Codex

The ragged lignin on whose tensile
And commercial weave words spring
And waver through the windlass of the wood,
Is, in the course of time, delayed,
As all things seem to be today,
Swallowed up in fiber and disguised in boards
To lurch in beds and coffins through the fray
Of trunk and pulp, without whose shuddering bamboo
All the roots like these, emptily arrayed
Through primal air untouched, unheld,
As loose as fruits unleashed from stems,
Would tumble down like flowers from the weld
With which, in friskets and in platens,
The vises of the forest squeeze them closely
Each to each, doused in waving scents
And staggering like cyclones in the trees,
Bound like sabal palms in bearded fronds,
Threading choirs through their press of leaves
And cloned around our spines like magic wands.