Trees

It's time to learn. The winter trees.
How head to toe they're clad in frost.
Stiff monumental tapestries.

It's time to learn that region where
the crystal turns to steam and air,
and where the trees swim through the mist
like something remembered but long lost.

The trees, and then the stream behind,
the wild duck's silent sway of wing,
the deep blue night, white and blind,
where stands the hooded tribe of things,
here one must learn the unsung deeds
of heroism of the trees.

Geyser

It began. First came the salt.
The crystals split and then
reformed. So it began. Earth's icy feet
trod all things down and ground them deep.
Then came the voids. Grown slender,
subjected to enormous pressure,
it gradually squeezed between
the tortured folds of rock below.
till suddenly: echo,
a whole precipitous caveful of it, then once again
the cranial black shell
of an enormous stony brain,
cut into clod and runnel
in scalding corkscrew motion, to strain
and steam until -

It burst. Suspended, still.
One long vertical sliver
of time nailed into steam and frozen emptiness.
The leap itself pure silver,
all watery muscle, bodiless,
a stretching forth, helpless, stopped.
      And then it dropped,
spring recoiling into body,
into earth's steam-saline lap,
and tremors shook the hollow crack
as, grumbling and vanishing,
its wild heart juddered back.

· From The Night of Akhenaton by Agnes Nemes Nagy, translated by George Szirtes, published by Bloodaxe