Apple Tree

[makeshift]

One million years,
spat and chewed and spat by sun cycles.
Charcoal branches
bear no fruit, only
echoes.

Petrified bole,
serpents twisting through pale air.
Heartwood, and grit,
adorned with rope tied talons, and
black feathery masses.

Pheasants hung like,
Salem heretics.
Aging game left uneaten,
cast toward roots and
eternal ashes, but

the peacock,
like the lotus flower floating on murky water,
rest above the soot soiled tree,
and above his avian sisters, floating as
a white dandolian seed
free from its dead stalk.