Explore "Advice to Maple-Trees" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ O little maple-trees, / Slender and unkempt, looking with shaggy askance / Upon the moon-spiked solitude; / O little maple-trees, / Growing a little toward the sky / That touches you to all eyes save your own, / You rattle insistently for wings, / But wings could never tear / The stain of earth from your feet: / The earth that gnaws at you until / Your wing-cries strike the autumn night. / You see, with me, this crescent moon / Juggled on the tawny fingertip / Of a running cloud. / The touch of your desire, or its fall, / Would but be symbols of an equal death.