Cut Into The Human Wood Poem by Brian Taylor

Cut into the human wood
chop; pare;
to find what is already there.
Will the knife reveal
what we have outgrown?
Or does the sculptor feel
along the veins and in the bone
the shape already in the stone
and gently, where the stone is brittle,
cut only not too much and not too little?

Or there again,
you might be just the wall,
my favourite picture on its hook;
behind (if I should ever look) ,
nothing at all.

Like sea
with sky reflected
deceiving me,
by birds rejected.