Cottonwood. A Poem.

This is an utterly random poem/thing I spontaneously wrote today while picking up a load of hay for my sister's horse. We drove by a slough and it had just rained and the window was down. I've always loved the smell of wetlands, water, marshes, rivers, and cottonwood trees...so this weird poem was born. If you can call it a poem.


Trees, you grow by the water.
I smell you.
Cold breeze, cold day, moist is the cool cool air on which your scent claws it's way to me, bloody and sweet like the dew of deep sewer gods. A bitter sweetness of rotting things and liquid. Ducks.
Your light reproduction would float on the gentle winds, tufted and soft, but the air is too thick with recent rain.
Trees, you grow by the water and your veins are filled with its fragrance.
Silvery bark and whispering leaves.
I smell you.
Mud is between your toes, oozy and dank like the meme. Dead things are in it and live things, squirming. Life is struggle and tiny lives burrow in the muck, fighting and killing and eating. Between your toes. If you could wiggle them, you would crush millions of lives. And duck shit.
I smell you.
Rotting grass, you are sweet and caress the ankles of the naked tree. Erotic and slimy.
Towering over it all, you grow by the water and clap your tiny, multidunious hands in a fluttering rhythm like Björk. You are not Björk, but a cousin to that pale-skinned saint-tree.
You grow by the water and its music lulls you to sleep so that you do not move your toes and squish the dark muck between them in oozy fountains of duck shit.
Sleep then, and do not kill...until the lightning strikes and your boughs crack and fall down down down through the yards of sparkling air to crash through the rusted roof of a Nissan and crack the ball cap of a scuzzy trailer park red neck.
I smell you.
Cottonwood.