follow the red thread, pulling up handfuls in each hand; cross the lake on floating bridge to where the strand meets sand. see there, in the shallows? funeral barks lie sunken, home to crabs in spiral shells. beyond the beach, the path moves into trees, past low stone walls and lonely wells. the red thread here is tied to branch to change its line, and there to sapling, there to berry bush, and there to sprout and spine. unravel all its twists and turns and tangles, and wind it in your hands: there are answers at the end of all these angles, if you bring what the dreamer demands. now head up the hill as forest thins. it isn’t high, but here the world spins, so guard your grip . . . there’ll be no climbing back here, should you slip.
atop the mound’s a tree, low-branched and gnarled, black-barked and white-leaved. find where the red thread’s tied to knuckled knot—more than tied, it’s ingrown, interweaved. unwind now what you’ve gathered, walk as moves a clock to wrap it round; circle until you count nine. link in your limbs as a weft to this warp. speak the words your forebears would have spoken. hold tight, and heed: the thread’s becoming vine.
the clouds above hang low, a smooth silver ceiling, moving with the wind but never broken. the thread-turned-vine is moving now, you’re growing more entwined—and these tendrils aren’t the only ones you’ve woken. the branches above bend rustling upward, the trunk expands with crackling wooden song. the roots drive down to waters below wells; soon the tree’s timetower-tall, and far around as solstice night is long.
now this tree’s The Tree, the deepest deep and widest wide and highest high. its crown reaches cloudheight, and tears that sheet to show a bright blue summer streak of sky.
the sun pours through the rift as incandescent light. react; reach out with fingerbranches, pull the parting wider. taste the luster on your leaves, a satisfaction stronger far than sight. drink to your fill of that sweet solar cider.
sated, pull yourself within, disguise yourself again as but another trunk among the trees. the split in the sky is seaming closed; this, some part of you still simply sees. remember now, dimly, the one you once were, whose eyes are folding into furrowed bark. as sky sews closed under sun, the last light dazzles, and the work is done; you fade into root-red, and dirt-throne dark.