Details |
Alycia Gleeson Poem
Dear swollen-trunk maple, deemed
diseased by the saw-happy tree guy,
you who have stood silently, supposedly
slipping your ailment through your roots
to the neighboring trees, now fallen
full blast down, geometrically down,
right angle, then parallel at last, your flat-
sawn stump blotched with incriminating
evidence—you came and leafed
and are gone, and I who have grown old
in your lifetime, who intuited you rather
than knew you, felt you in my bones,
now feel the slightly thinner woods,
the hint of frailty. Scott the tree guy
has carried your eighteen-inch logs in his
red wheelbarrow and stacked them
for winter: a little Williams, a little Frost.
Oh tree, everywhere I look
I have to pledge reclamation, fill
the forest floor with ferns, mushrooms,
pine needles, and in the side corner
place the outhouse, practically unused
anymore, still in good shape, emitting
its rich human-waste smell, its wood
smell, its few spiders climbing
their trellises with their sticky feet.
Oh tree, so much has been discovered
to fill in the space where you were:
seven new species of Philippine
forest mice, a new genus of blind
Bulgarian beetle, four new species
of jewel beetles, six of New World
micromoths. I have filled my note cards,
I have left the vertical space open
for the Ur-tree, the canonical vision
that will take your place, even the stigmata,
your bulged and arthritic joints, the
whither of your leaving, the grand word
whither standing where you were.
Copyright © Alycia Gleeson | Year Posted 2012
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Details |
Alycia Gleeson Poem
That I came back to live
in the region both
my parents died into
that I will die into
if I have nothing else
I have this and
it's not morbid
to think this way
to see things in time
to understand I'll be gone
that the future is already
some where
I'm in that somewhere
and what of it
it's ok to see these things
to be the way they are
I can be them
have been them
will be there, soon
I know why I came here
to be back here
where my parents went
I know that I'll be there
to join them soon
it's ok to think this way
why shouldn't I
whose gonna say I shouldn't
a doctor, some friend
I have no wife in this
at night, late, the dark
myself at the ceiling
the arguments continue
I'm with it, it's with me
I am quelque chose
something with birds in it
a storm high above Albany
I am ghost brain I
sister to all things cruelty
the mouse-back gray
of every afternoon
and your sorrowing
now that you're gone
and I'm here or now
that you're here and
I'm gone or now
that you're gone and
I'm gone what
did we learn
what did we take
from that oh
always dilating
now that you're here
and also gone
I am just learning
that threshold
and changing light
a leafy-shaped blue
drifting above
an upstate New York
Mohican light
a tungsten light
boxcar lights
an oaken table-rapping
archival light
burnt over, shaking
Copyright © Alycia Gleeson | Year Posted 2012
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