reading...

...John Updike's last poems in the New Yorker


Creeper

With what stoic delicacy does
Virginia creeper let go:
the feeblest tug brings down
a sheaf of leaves kite-high,
as if to say, 'To live is good
but not to live - to be pulled down
with scarce a ripping sound,
still flourishing, still
stretching toward the sun -
is good also, all photosynthesis
abandoned,' quite quits. Next spring
the hairy rootlets left unpulled
snake out a leafy afterlife
up that same smooth-barked oak.

John Updike