Every Sunday I post an original poem.
I don’t have any Christmas poems.
But since my brother and his wife are expecting a baby boy in June, and my friends Todd & Heather just had a baby girl, and my friends John and Michelle expect a baby any second now, here is a little thing about that moment when you first get the news.
It was a tremendous fall:
From the height of the hay bales,
Stacked two stories high, to the floor
Of the barn and the bicycle that broke
The fall and nearly my neck.
I prefer not to think about how close I came.
The scar, a tiny spot of weaker flesh
Shaped like a distant crescent moon,
Remains, as does the barn;
But the hay bales are gone.
I expected to see them still
There, and myself caught midair,
Pudgy childhood hands, shirt
Flapping and exposing skin tanned
By a reckless summer. Me, suspended
Forever, before the bruise and the poultice
Of stinging herbs.
I’d walk under me, pretend
To catch me, poke at my smaller limbs,
Try to recognize my face
Full of its incredulous joy and fear, even try
To pull me down
From that ridiculous frozen flailing position.
But no proof remains that I ever flew.
Just that once a bicycle stopped my face.
No evidence of anything tremendous,
Except the way my eyes avoid a spot
Precisely 17 feet and 4 inches above the floor,
3 yards from the tool rack’s
Southern edge, right under
The rafter I missed, a spot
Roughly boy-shaped and soaring.
The best sort of shark,
Chasing longfins too large
To mouth, graceful grey,
Paint fleck fins, a lofty
Catfish, small, not big
Enough to eat but proud
Of hunting, his name
An attitude, a look, and
All the teeth he needs.
VI.
The Forest
The trees stand apart from each other,
afraid to come too close,
trunks worn smooth by the streams of wolves coursing past them
and the scratching deer.
Smooth columns: this is a cathedral of trees,
a place of arches and infinite doorways
formed by branches curving silently into the air.
Stained stars hang from the vaulted boughs:
flowers of wax,
candles burning with inner light,
exuding scents and marble incense.
A place of worship where hapless trees are choked
with glacial trailing patience
until the massed weight of coils makes arches creak
in the spring rains, when elephants bellow.
Then the bough breaks
and the sound of one tree falling
reverberates like bells and bells and belltowers.
Some comfort lies in knowing
A tree’s inner core gilds a human wall,
And no one pays it mind —
I stared into her faded eyes, while willing
Into being a look not a reflection
Of my own. Her bones have been
Unlearning youth for years,
And dry rot clenches whispery hands
Around her veins. She feels oblivion,
Perhaps, and rooted fears to die —
And worse, the fear of being furnishing
For a mourner’s heart, a comfortable
Seat for sadness on display, a grief
Unlearned, replaced, reborn, beveled
By the familiar gaze of children wishing
For knowledge, continuation, and belief.
I pay her mind, in hopes that one will do
The same for me — ring me, round me, learn
And ground me, make me theirs, and never burn
The grains that build me, where they gild me
through and through.
