The Problem of Foliage
Their infinite quantity, which, if simply infinite
would not provoke such quandary. Unending
yet countable, discrete, shaped recognizably,
and grouped in massive piles or clouds,
in German, Laub, close to “loaf” and “body.”
The human approach, to do one’s utter best
to identify, number, and trace the shape of each
as far as the picture extends (to keep the picture small),
in the manner of Cornelius Cort, his Hermit Saint in Landscape
struck by a gust of radiance that blows back the fascicles,
the saint’s body also struck in leafing forth,
self into world.
In the fields above my neighborhood
now-you-see-it follows now-you don’t.
Last night’s rain lingers on the grass,
each leaf folded like a trough along the midrib,
its seeming sole purpose to contain
and channel down the hollow stem
a sequence of magnifying droplets.
On the wrong trail
in thick woods in dimming twilight,
what green was that? Deep, dull, indistinct
green of the almost lost; what shapes were those?
Then when I came to the meadow,
which I previously had sought and also not found,
its humming yellow straws and plumes and flutes,
though still innumerable, were also quite distinct.
To infinity can be added semi-translucence,
color emerging as some of the light simply reflects
and some enters the substance,
passes between the particles
to be partly absorbed and partly reflected
so that a second hue emerges together with the first:
“the play of the color on the surfaces of the waves
is made up largely of these two elements”
(Ogden Rood).
In my attempts to know them
they impress themselves on me:
oak, pointed,
maple, squarish,
elm, lopsided,
beech, veins exactly parallel,
poplar, as if unfinished,
sycamore, bigger than your hand,
and lime or linden,
forming a bank or wall of dark-green, rounded leaves,
toothed edge, veins radial, tapering to a slender point,
and at this time in June thickly interspersed with aromatic
blooms, each tassel plumed with a single yellow tongue.