A cypress casts its shadow onto sandstone,
blurring Milton's name
inscribed in the immortals' frieze
as prologue to Humanities,
stencilling projections of green foliage
as flattened flames
that mesmerise the gazer
from an aperture in library walls,
with glass pane as interstice
between learning and the life outdoors.
Light rotates tree-silhouettes
across the opposite facade,
sand particles fused solid,
quarried from a site called Helidon
to hive the works and buzzing words
of scholar, cynic, sage, and bard.
Between the inert mass of books
and air, philosophies and trees,
my eyes follow the dance of leaves
that fibrillate in sun and breeze,
and contemplate the artificial forest
of their ancestors, pressed between boards
with rigid spines and angles alien to rain,
organic grain and rings of growth
flattened into ciphered page,
as I search for energies
to reconnect the fractured parts,
a medium through whom can pass
nature's dialogue with art.