Here there should be wood

here there should be wood but there's me instead
standing up in a lightning struck hollow
I am Jonah, the oak tree is a whale

and then I am part-whale

cavity walls, skin of lizard, fire-crack black
algal green overlay on crosshatch-fractures

looking is ushered upwards, sight shot out
skyward, straight though a peephole

the tree, now Cyclops by dint of my eyes
human senses added to those old oaken ones
making eleven in all

seeing itself for the first time

branches jacknifed to injured chevrons
boughs, whole chunks of tree, strewn dead and dying
like fallen comrades on a battlefield

damage surveyed, I hatch out of the tree
there's nothing it didn't already know

Microcosmic