If old men are trees they may have thighs like

tree limbs, while they have hearts of human muscle

beating and beating. They have grown their own

knotted and cross-grained ways, but they are

gentle gentlemen waving arms in the breeze

to attract each other. They can share their

pollen with no care for whose nose it bothers

because they are trees. What they have understood

is their own business and hard to explain, except

being trees they know one day they may become

hollow, and rot before they’re cut down, but

they keep on growing. If old men need a picture

of who they are, being literal-minded, maybe

they need to be trees to show how they have

twisted their trunks into a figure: but they aren’t,

they’re old men with blood and guts and fingers

and faces, bodies that are nothing like trees.

A Metaphor