A sacred tree? Branches raised in prayer?
I doubt it. Leafless, flouting its nakedness,
not, as yew trees stand, in a country churchyard

with the forgiven dead, absolved of sins,
but in the unforgiven Byron’s garden
in Genoa, site of improper loves.

What could the old tree know of Byron’s thoughts
loving another’s love, when over his wall
he peered at nuns walking a narrow path,

freed for a time from a convent’s iron bars?
I wonder if he laughed, knowing himself
pure by day, reckless lover by night

in this land where holiness and evil
conjoin: on one wall of a gallery,
paintings of a luminous Saint Catherine

and of a serpent, coiled, waiting to spring,
heighten one another, as this yew tree
at high noon casts shadow behind it

to show what brightness is. Here I,
carrying a cargo of mistakes,
wondering how flawed were my own acts,

stroke its grooved bark as I watch the sun
unshadow what I know the yew tree knows.