Synaptic Trees My Astral Arms

by BOBBY PARROTT

I extract a long brass key from my quiver
of ballpoint questions, like children
spill their insects from the vented jar

of their books. When my shoes 
take off their shared-body headpieces,
cool down and sleep in the vestibule

of a forest, their soles bend on foreign
sidewalks unhardened by the stipple
of porous concrete. Woven into the world

of my unshod body, distanced time-wise
from terrestrial ligaments. Synapse reaching
across for synapse, mycelia's tangle buried

in Gaea's womb of hosts. She wishes me 
whole, an architecture searching my hands
as leaves. I speak in spread arms, amplify

their argument, thrust their stick-figure
wings up for the Great Envelopment. I find
branch-holds of bracken, who I am before

the acorn dropped from mother, bark blind
and on my way back. In the harbor of her voice
she wavers, mingles the negative shapes

of my own starlight, sky condensed, a figure 
carved into the always we'd imagined in church
would remember us, welcome us, keep us.