My Gospel Leaves: A Poem

Here’s another poem by Drew Gillies, shared with permission:
http://chuvv.blogspot.com/

My Gospel Leaves
My gospel is flat-topped, sold out and tired
Four laws from uninspired
My gospel is fog, and haze, and hope,
Like a cloud, dangling from a rope
My gospel needs to fall away
To stop its descriptions without delay
My gospel lacks definition–it defines
Too precisely
My condition.
Perhaps it’s reached its autumn
In its long forgotten heat
And as its leaves turn gold, and drop
I gaze within its lingering canopy
And look for what’s forgotten
A temperate underneath
My gospel was once a brilliant green
Broad reach to ends unseen.
I’d never have denied it
Until the day I found myself.
Outside it.
My gospel is now on floating leaf
Swirling on a gust of grief.
This autumn just got colder
It seems I, and the world, just got older
Perhaps, if I can see
The outline of the tree
My gospel remembered green
Will again find something to mean.
Perhaps the empty branches
Will in time provide the answers.
But wait. The fog is clearing.
Is the revelation nearing?
A jolting recognition reels me,
as warm realization steels me.
This was never a tree at all, even from the start.
It always was, and always will be,
a heart.
My gospel is old and never grows
Now crunching brown beneath my toes.
But yours is pumping, vibrant, now.
My soul, at last, can see it. Wow.