When I was around 50 and walking one spring morning, I was amused to encounter a clump of purple wisteria flowers poking like a face through a front yard fence.

wisteria blooms
pilloried between fence slats
face the morning sun

Soon after, walking in the same season and the same neighborhood but looking up and down, I was impressed by the calligraphy of leafless branches against the bright sky. I didn’t have a camera so I tried to fill my eyes. And later on I recorded this:

The canopy is azure shot with cracks
that spider like a jigsaw puzzle cut
a thousand pieces small. A tree makes tracks
across the sky and I look up, unshut
my eyes and grasp a graphic miracle
amazing more than all the ads and art
we fabricate, and fleet. That tree will fill
with leaves and grow my simile apart.

Above, a sycamore dissects the sky
with capillary branches, while a jay
repels with confidence a thieving crow.
A broken sparrow’s egg begins to dry
on warming concrete as I walk today
beneath a metaphor, within a show.