what I want

that the tree having lost a limb growing old on this property might last,
might last a few more summers while I am watching it each day reconstructing
other trees and those twisted Van Gogh yellows and limes awash in leaves
in the heat of the day June 1889 Olive trees near the asylum at Saint Remy,
although here it’s black and white as the sky pales and each limb
becomes itself, dark, rough, turning over and under as light dictates
and of a sudden the back and forth creates a state of mind not of the asylum
but increasingly unhinged as if one could take leave easily
as light skinnies down the smooth black trunk