It’s just a mood, perhaps, but he stands stunned,
the densest woods so asymmetrical:
gnarled trunks and twisting branches, splashing sun
that here collects in pools, and there slants straight.

He likes the orderly but in a lull
the random overwhelms him.  One tree white,
the others mossy brown; a stream misshaped
by boulders, broken logs. 

                                                Woods demonstrate
confusion’s reign, if one’s astute: the loops
a swallow swoops seem odd, math-free.  He’s fooled
himself these many years with phantom rules:

to prize his abacus, to calculate,
have been his life, but now he sees it all:

stormstrewn chaos.  A maple’s sudden fall.