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Tree House Hill
by Grant Clauser Every crooked line ended in nails enough to nearly kill the tree. Tar paper held with spit, wire and duct tape helped to keep out rain, but not spiders—they crept in on wind the creaking trees explained. We thought of it as something we owned, though built on someone else’s land. We stole the wood and nails too, stole candles from our mothers’ cupboards and Schlitz cans from our dads’. Broke every branch that wouldn’t bend. Its rotten timbers wore through winters and its nails held fast in storms. Mice and birds that burrowed in, we chased out, and out again when found. The trees always trying to reclaim what we’d build up from the ground. What’s left is dirt on someone else’s field. When trucks and dozers tore it down to build a road, we had long since left our younger lives for cars and beer. Now, when pavement cracks and weeds fight through, I think of trees that filled the hill like soldiers standing up against a surge, all the lines we knew would end, and all the bets we lost. Ladder, roof and door, four walls held up by hope and wire more than nails and all the treetops washed in fire in the fall. |
Grant Clauser lives in Hatfield Pennsylvania and has published two books of poetry: Necessary Myths (winner of the 2013 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize) and The Trouble with Rivers (Foothills Publishing). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Mason’s Road, Southern Poetry Review and others. He also writes about electronics, teaches poetry at random places and chases trout with a stick. His blog can be found here.
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