Married to a Xylophage

Does it still grow?
How wood you know, the dodo tempo and rhythm of mortis?
Still it stands a wooden ghoul.
How many times euthanized and resuscitated?
Yet still it stands,
Committed to that spot long ago.
In youth, jading every spring,
Now arthritic limbs blossom to leisurely
Winter's petrification blooms perpetually,
God scarcely smiling underneath it anymore.
She has driven off or vanquished all it could cling to for support,
Tree, mammal, rock.
Even chummy kudzu dares not advocate an acquaintance.
What senescent memory remains, retained in those reapered rings
Not yet eaten by dementia?
What suspended consciousness silently screams for autonomy
Inside that broken, dripping frame
Passed over by the aphid angels?
Is it an introspective contortion or the tenacious termite's tiny, tickling torture
Twisting the bark into its gnarled grim grin?