I stand before the bud and will not pry.
The scales lie shingled, brown, and glued with resin,
Each one a shut and sticky eyelid, closed
On something that has not yet chosen shape.
You come with lens and blade to part the layers
And name the pleated leaf a type, a rule,
A single form repeating through the stem.
But what you hold is dead before it’s named:
The cut cell leaks its sap upon your glass,
And all that swelled with water, pushing out
Against the scales, is flat and fixed and still.
I will not pull the pleats apart for law.
Let rain-light fall upon the folded green;
Let ribs unfold at their own pace in dark
Where no one asks them what they mean to be.
The mind that grasps at pattern ends the bloom,
For every fact you win, a wonder dies.
I’d rather live inside the mist, unsure,
And watch the bud break open, uncontained,
Than hold your Urform, perfect, in a hand
That closed upon the leaf and found it gone.

You name the eye a knife, and think to praise
The darkness by refusing what it yields.
I bring no scalpel, nor a chilling glass
To pin the severed tissue to a board;
The butcher’s art is Linnaeus’s, not mine.
I watch the surge of sap without a wound.
Look where the resin softens in the noon:
The scale is not a tomb, but earlier leaf
Contracted, hardened, holding back the tide
Until the node expands. The pleats you dread
Are not an abstract number, but the wave
Of green metamorphosis taking time,
Where node to internode the tissue breathes,
Ascending through the spiral of the stem.
To hide inside the mist is merely sleep;
It leaves the living open secret blind.
The law is not a ghost behind the bark,
Nor concept stamped upon the yielding shoot:
The form is active in the very sap,
Revealed in daylight, legible and whole.

You say you do not cut, yet still you reach.
The scale you call a leaf that learned to wait
Was never told to you by any bud.
You lay the stem’s long order on its skin
And read the sequence you had brought along.
The noon that softens resin on the scale
Gives warmth and amber, gives no reason why.
It does not say “contracted,” nor “ascend.”
Those words are yours, and each one is a thumb
Pressed on the swelling tissue, wave by wave.
Behold the bud at dusk: the scales grow dark,
A thread of green shows at the broken seam,
And light, so little, falls upon the fold
That no one living knows what it will be.
Not you, not I, nor yet the leaf itself;
Your law arrives the morning after bloom,
A pressed and tidy ghost of what was green.
I keep the doubt; it keeps the bud alive.
Let others have their wisdom. I have this:
The swelling that is not yet anything.

Nothing? You call the labor of the root
An empty dark, because it keeps its tongue?
The scale was not invented by my speech:
Feel where the resin seals the hardened edge—
That armor is the winter’s heavy work,
The gathering inward of the summer’s reach
To shield the tender growing point from frost.
Now count no numbers, let the rule go cold;
Simply observe the swelling at the node:
The sap that climbed in darkness does not drift,
Nor stumble into accident and chance.
It pushes through the sheath; the fibers spread;
The lateral veins run outward from the core,
Repeating what the cotyledon spoke
Before the seed had fallen in the dirt.
The eye that sees this pulse imposes naught;
It only tracks the motion of the green.
Your tender doubt would freeze it in the bud,
Afraid that light might prove the plant awake:
The leaf does not need mist to make it whole.

You say the eye imposes naught, and yet
You tell me what the cotyledon spoke.
No seed has ever said a word to you;
The veins run outward, and you hear a voice.
I grant no tongue to what you call its speech.
You ask me what the winter’s work has meant,
But work is yours, and armor, and the word
“Protect.” The scale was only brown and glued.
A frost may kill the tip it never saw.
You say I fear the light, and I say no:
The light is on the bud, and so am I,
Close in the cold, and neither of us knows
What swelling at the node will be by spring.
You call that fear. I’ll call it company.
You track the pulse and count it as a proof;
I feel the pulse and let it stay a pulse.
The sap does not confirm your sequence, nor
Deny it. It is rising. That is all.
Say what you like about the tender doubt;
It has not once pulled back the bud to look,
And still the bud, unwatched, will break at dawn.

You call it company, yet keep it dumb,
And praise the dawn for breaking in the blind.
If all your wonder is an empty gaze
That will not read the spiral as it climbs,
You are an exile from the physical ground:
A phantom standing idle in the frost,
Who makes the world a mirror for his doubt.
The green shoot does not borrow eyes from us,
Nor ask your silence to protect its birth.
Light strikes the tissue; cellular and firm,
The sheath yields downward by an ancient track:
The scale unclasps; the petiole extends;
The serrate margin cuts the morning air
To build another node along the stem.
This is no concept printed on a page;
The archetype is active in the sap,
Demanding comprehension, not your sleep;
I trace the living axis in the sun,
And standing in the noon, I call it known.