For over five-hundred years, an island
of red birch trees has huddled in the top 
right corner of a page, rootless in a field 
of what might be snow, except for leaves 
still covering the branches. It’s a summer day
in scarlet, a negative undeveloping in sunlight, 
much like the shadow-worlds I pondered 
as a child, paging through my parents’ 
photo albums. But what if instead of
disappearing, like the sun behind the hill,
a snapshot of a life that used to be,
the drawing offers up its fragments 
and loose ends, inviting us to weave 
the fabric of a world that never was, 
but could be, one we’d imagine
out of air if we commenced to dream?