It’s not impolite to stare at a tree
Even a tree winter
naked. A tree that didn’t glory
in spare, sculptural nakedness
would never agree to be
deciduous, step from a gown
of leaves and be bare for so
long you’d think last year
was the last year. Dead, now
cast of lead. An oak, to take
an example, stubborn against
insistent Spring. Sap rises and once
invisible buds redden, swell
and the tree begins to glow,
like the hint of first light.
We don’t know if the pink swell
is pain or pleasure or
both in one, a pain you’d choose
again and again like February.
Twenty-eight Twelve Cesar Chavez Avenue
Alone, like an oil stain in the night street,
you sit drunk, sure east is north
and your
house just ahead under the reach of trees
you should know better.
Your compass
spins. Your gyroscope junk. I can’t leave
you the dumb helpless I’ve been after my times
of too much, when I walked into a ditch
of blackberries, the runnel of water so cold
it stung,
into a barbed wire fence instead
of the path, and once the road home
led instead to graveyard. I held out
against the cold against a headstone for first
light. Tell me your address, which I will barely
believe, and lean your greater weight
on my right shoulder,
and I’ll carry
your Chinese take-out gone cold
in my left hand and we will forget
our fathers and become for a half
hour one man more bulbous and grotesque
than Saint Quasimodo,
a chump
in a story with a goat and a woman
by the water,
and we will find
your house if it’s there. When your belt
slips below your hip, we’ll have to stop,
stymie any momentum, even
the bored moon then a little anxious
as you reel and hike up
your trousers.
Twice, you too fumble
fingered, I will have to wrench
them up for you, twice as one might reach
down into a barrel
of foul water and look away,
the intimate stink too much. And you will
tell me how you had to poison
the entire city of rats tunneled beneath
an ancient backyard cherry stump. Dead
everywhere. And you will stumble
a half dozen
times but topple only once and I will wish
without hope for a winch or pulley
or a brother to help
hoist you
to your seesaw feet and we’ll turn
and take the steps to your porch
as I end a charity that flakes
no sins from my spine
to where
a slender woman ignores me, gathers
you like a bulky, wet great coat. Eases you inside.
John C. Morrison‘s most recent book, Monkey Island, was published by redbat books. His work has appeared previously in Willawaw Journal, as well as in numerous other journals such as Poetry Northwest and Rhino. A long time resident of Portland, Oregon, he teaches at the Attic Institute and is a guest editor for the Comstock Review.
