The Call
the old birch tree sends its long, twitching limbs through the damp earth, moist dirt,
pushes aside crumbling concrete, old bones, metal boxes
containing forgotten treasure, the skeletons of much-loved pets
searches with tiny roots for other trees, crawls around fence posts, investigates
the neighbors’ yards, taps out
its own tree-version of Morse code against buried boulders, the foundations
of houses, against the limestone bedrock, says, are you there?
am I alone? busies itself with poking into drainage pipes,
wrapping around telephone cables, waits for an answer, waits for
another tree to find it.
Exiled
I walk between the towers stretching high
above this old, dead world
spiders spinning meteor streaks
connecting the stars.
There is nothing left alive here
just faded photos of happy faces
taped to doors, frayed edges flapping
in the dusty wind.
I walk between the endless spires
of bombed-out hotels and burnt youth centers
sapphire shards of ionized glass
grows like grass
in sidewalk cracks.
a small child’s doll sits in a driveway
legs plastic puddles, part of the pavement
I pull the string hanging from its back
just to hear a voice.
There is nothing left alive here
just empty windows of mausoleums
guarding their precious inhabitants:
still-life shadows burnt in stucco
happy families
before the blast.
That Day
the last tree
at the end of the world
will wear
a human face
mouth open in a frozen scream
only withered leaves
and bleached bones
will hear.
This Thing Has Set In, and These are Her Words
she says she wants me to drive her
far, far away, out past the tall gray concrete
city buildings, past the picturesque farms with shiny
silver grain silos and peaceful black-and-white cattle
munching on bright green grass, past the tumbled-down
beat-up mobile-home park guarded by junkyard dogs
and bearded men leaning on their long steel-barreled rifles
cowboy hats tipped forward just far enough that you can’t see
their eyes, past the foothills of the cloud-colored mountains
and up and up and up because
somewhere in that collection of snow-capped peaks is
a valley filled with curly ferns and thorn-tipped rosebushes
and climbing twining vines, a tiny green place that she’s only
seen in dreams but she knows it’s there and when
we get there I am to let her out of the car and then
go straight back home, I am to leave her to spend
the few shorts days or hours or she has left sitting on the banks
of the empty pond we will find there, watching her reflection fade
to an emaciated skeleton in a torn red dress.
the old birch tree sends its long, twitching limbs through the damp earth, moist dirt,
pushes aside crumbling concrete, old bones, metal boxes
containing forgotten treasure, the skeletons of much-loved pets
searches with tiny roots for other trees, crawls around fence posts, investigates
the neighbors’ yards, taps out
its own tree-version of Morse code against buried boulders, the foundations
of houses, against the limestone bedrock, says, are you there?
am I alone? busies itself with poking into drainage pipes,
wrapping around telephone cables, waits for an answer, waits for
another tree to find it.
Exiled
I walk between the towers stretching high
above this old, dead world
spiders spinning meteor streaks
connecting the stars.
There is nothing left alive here
just faded photos of happy faces
taped to doors, frayed edges flapping
in the dusty wind.
I walk between the endless spires
of bombed-out hotels and burnt youth centers
sapphire shards of ionized glass
grows like grass
in sidewalk cracks.
a small child’s doll sits in a driveway
legs plastic puddles, part of the pavement
I pull the string hanging from its back
just to hear a voice.
There is nothing left alive here
just empty windows of mausoleums
guarding their precious inhabitants:
still-life shadows burnt in stucco
happy families
before the blast.
That Day
the last tree
at the end of the world
will wear
a human face
mouth open in a frozen scream
only withered leaves
and bleached bones
will hear.
This Thing Has Set In, and These are Her Words
she says she wants me to drive her
far, far away, out past the tall gray concrete
city buildings, past the picturesque farms with shiny
silver grain silos and peaceful black-and-white cattle
munching on bright green grass, past the tumbled-down
beat-up mobile-home park guarded by junkyard dogs
and bearded men leaning on their long steel-barreled rifles
cowboy hats tipped forward just far enough that you can’t see
their eyes, past the foothills of the cloud-colored mountains
and up and up and up because
somewhere in that collection of snow-capped peaks is
a valley filled with curly ferns and thorn-tipped rosebushes
and climbing twining vines, a tiny green place that she’s only
seen in dreams but she knows it’s there and when
we get there I am to let her out of the car and then
go straight back home, I am to leave her to spend
the few shorts days or hours or she has left sitting on the banks
of the empty pond we will find there, watching her reflection fade
to an emaciated skeleton in a torn red dress.
