a fallen oak, stripped

a fallen oak, stripped 

of its outer bark, reveals 

its inner beauty

On the edge of the cliff cut into the hill by the meandering creek, an oak tree with a branching trunk has fallen across the path, broken off partway up the main trunk. I have a choice of bushwhacking through the thorny gooseberries and multiflora rose brambles or crawling through the maze of sharp twigs. I clamber through the twigs, noting the number of oak galls clinging like wrinkled brown fruit to the leafless branches. The tree looks naked, pink under its stripped bark, yet the blue lichens and black fungal markings adorning the pink and russet inner bark look like miniature abstract paintings. 
          The day that I pass through the fallen oak is 6 January, the Feast of Epiphany, celebrating the visit of the three Magi bearing gifts to baby Jesus. In the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keilor, I had just read about James Joyce's short story "The Dead," which is set at an Epiphany feast. Joyce defines epiphany as the "revelation of the the soul of the whatness of a thing," the moment when "the soul of the commonest object . . . seems to us radiant." For me, the dead tree lying across my path brings the gifts of its inner essence, grace and radiant beauty.