How language changes around here: speculations and a poem

You wish to make a good friend?
Look at the pine and cypress trees.
Amidst the frost, they do not fall to earth.
When winter comes, they do not leave.
               Po Chu-yi (Bai Juyi) (9th century)

As I approach my outdoor classroom I look for at least one star between the two pines ahead. And wonder how often the crow's beaten me to it. Not to the star so much as the poem that usually follows. It's not a competition & I'm more interested in the poem that may appear between the spaces than the crow itself, though he's sometimes the reason I look and sometimes the reason I don't. It strikes me that the star is very cordially indifferent to our looking.

But today I did manage a bit of speculation on the development of language. I didn't need a prompt from a book this time but a visible example outside of the way a pine drawn against the sky (and particularly the space between a crow and star) can open like a vowel & even discard its branches like so many useless median letters. It seemed to poke at rather enunciate the first word . And I imagined how that evolving lingo must have looked to one Simon of Rome sitting in his limestone tower, at the most northerly edge of the bay.

As it turns out, I beat the crow to the poem (which follows below)


Simon of Rome says,

Between 2 pines, there's at least 1 star
The whims and sins of a
a few stay the same
Conventions of the crow are hard to change,
way up there

Works are now to be written in the oracular!

Simon, in his luminous attic,
editions of Luther, Du Bellay beside him,
held his ground
and foretold a change in language

(a change towards the oracular, as he said!)

the needle to supersede the leaf,
stem's gothic stiffness,

as memorable an event as when the sturgeon's
                                                              fair
replaced the zebra's

Under his care
the High bay dialect will be shown to triumph over
a cold cold lake,

mobilizing the scattered eel,
replacing the silent 'o's of the ancient gulls

Consider the long-necked 'fork' in the Pine,
revered—
it's not just a cross
but a letter,
while the plentiful cedar-gin, & the hummer's
beak,
are the book


He who reads, says Simon, reads the sand in a star,
& the moon below
& the lakes above, for once

As easy to do as
swooshing the pesky bugs off an ol' maple scroll