The Comic Tree

On the shaded side of the high rise flats,
below twenty floors of beige cement,
there grows a tree, threadbare and rickety,
superannuated, but still alive,
and roughly two stories high.

Who knows how it ever got a start.
To keep it going, God reaches down
every other year
and runs his invisible hand
through its prickly leaves.

This is a tree that does not play host
to a circus of birds,
nor cracks a quick joke,
nor sports a butchered and loopy trunk.

Quite simply, its raffish and comic streak
consists of catching fallen clothes,
chiefly blown shirts and gusted underwear,
racking them up for the world to see

until each item of this lingering lingerie
becomes like a piece of ragged fruit
and then weathers away, to sweet nothing.

Maybe you don't see funny side of it,
viewing the tree and all its razzamatazz
as a grim gathering of I-surrender flags.

Or maybe you look up to it
as a daring investment
in apocalyptic haute couture.

As for Le Corbusier,
that tree must be a bad dream,
designed to lampoon
the concept of a public washing line.