How Trees Behave in Winter

After showing off in autumn -
disrupting trains and confounding leaf blowers -
trees find themselves naked in winter,
forced to stand in parks and on busy roadsides,
feeling awkward.

They bear this burden stoically,
balancing, and perfecting their silhouettes.

Sometimes they look like brains;
sometimes they look like x-rayed broccoli;
sometimes they look like upturned hands with a hundred fingers.

Lime trees look like Sonic the Hedgehog

and the oak by the bus stop is a wooden Shiva, all knees and elbows.

In the park, beech saplings
stretch out their greasy arms
and whine "Look at our russet skirts! Look at our russet skirts!"
but I ignore them;
the beeches at the side of the motorway
wait like patient commuters
but I can't stop staring,
suspecting another Birnam.

Winter trees enjoy geometry and fashion:
a thicket of alders contains more angles
than a maths book
and after a snowstorm
they pose like Mary Quant models,
skinny and monochrome.

At teatime
bare branches make a van Gogh out of a streetlamp
and on a snowy morning
they spill black ink onto a pale sky
(the little hawthorn doodles
but the towering ash writes hieroglyphics in cursive)

Sometimes a line of trees makes a caterpillar on a distant horizon

and in the middle of a roundabout
schoolgirl poplars stand shivering in a circle,
wearing white socks and wishing it was summer...