Jilted

How quickly the landscape fills
with figures, with code, with the palpable
unspoken, where once trees,
for example, bore in each leaf
only a little slow factory
making work for itself tomorrow,
one day ahead of itself like trust.
Bent to themselves like that,
how could they serve to show
if you will come or not, or be late
merely, or disappear?
                                          Now that trees
stand for something I can't
understand, and so must be figures
for articulate loss, they seem
as tragic as we are, emblems
rather than habits. If again this time
you don't come, perhaps it will be
because you are already
allegorical, and I will turn here
like a weathervane, a rooster
soldered to his useless work.


 —William Matthews