180 WITH EARTH AND SKY 
So, laughing in spirit and with my lips, I 
gathered the curious green-branch parasite with 
its fruit, white touched with green. A strange 
plant it is. The seed is viscous and soft as a 
baby’s flesh; and to wonder how it can plant 
itself on the rind of a cottonwood and take root 
in that barren soil; and, more of a mystery still, 
how it can take root in the rind of an oak, that 
soil hard as a frozen ground inside the arctic 
circle. With the brown, sweet soil where the 
wild spring flowers grow, mistletoe seed will 
have nothing to do. It spurns that lovely hos- 
pitality to things that care to grow. And with 
inexplicable aspiration it takes its perch on the 
swaying branch of a gnarly tree. Parasite it is, 
but airy parasite. It aims high. The ivy roots 
in the ground and climbs the trunk and mantles 
trunk and branches. Not so the mistletoe. 
It spurns the ground. It lights like a silent bird 
on the high branch. It cares not for the tree 
trunk. It wants height, and light, and the cradling 
of a swaying branch rocked by the wind. The 
oriole builds its nest on the far branch-tip; the 
mistletoe, not quite so adventurous yet adven- 
turing far from the trunk, clings to the wind- 
blown branch and there roots its pretty wilder- 
ness of startling green which in winter when 
branches are bare and shadow and music are no 
more, rocks its startling emerald when the world 
about it has forgotten greenery. 
While the wind cut capers and the angry 
