The Canopy App

When I was a child in the backwoods

of a provincial place

there were so many forests

trees bounding all around us

you could climb carve

sleep under boughs and limbs

when my sister and I looked up 

we were sheltered as in Grimm’s tales

all the floral gestures guessing 

and the foliage as evergreen

as childhood generally is 

a fabric that calmed me just as well

as our mother’s forehead strokes

when she carried us to bed

after a cup of tea on a blanket 

under her limbs nooks

combs and branchlets

made of something once called a canopy

only this century nearly obsolete

a blanket or rather layers 

of verdant sheets under which we lit 

or wrote our notes 

hands playing with angles of light 

I mean actually eating that light

which is in some ways 

this world’s first miracle our Canopy app 

will provide users with 

miraculous screens of breezy aboves 

structures and not-structures

of impressionistic birdsongs

lush and aromatherapeutic

what better way to quell

our human grief after realizing

all the best canopies have withered

like our mothers’ fingers

this will be the only app in the world

that will return us 

to arrays of spindling forms 

where we’ll sleep like tiny feathered 

animals in touch with textures 

of green and with dreaming again.