But as one was felling a log, his axe head fell into the water, and he cried out, “Alas, my master! It was borrowed.” Then the man of God said, “Where did it fall?” When he showed him the place, he cut off a stick and threw it in there and made the iron float. And he said, “Take it up.” So he reached out his hand and took it.”
—2 Kings 6:5-7
How singular’s the cause that makes that tree
so tall and makes it grow invertedly.
—Purgatorio XXXIII.65–6
The afternoon was fertile for upside down trees.
The sky was clay
and Lindeman Lake was blue
as Michelangelo’s fresco heavens.
We looked straight across the mountain lake
through jutting branches of a cedar.
Our backs to the trunk,
it might have been rooted in the sky,
as if a silver fishing spinner could lift
from lake-bottom mud and silt
and turn toward the surface,
emerging with the soft slap
of a raindrop striking the surface of the lake,
in a reversal sifted through substance
to speak the tongue of earth.