for Diana
The Lost Tree of Ténéré
was the last of a dwindling grove
of acacias that could not adapt
to the changing climate
or to the hungry animals
that traveled upwind
& yet despite or because
of its ensuing isolation
this tree dug deeper
into the earth
& grew windswept
with desert brush
The night of your death
I was reminded of this story
For hundreds of years & hundreds of miles
of Sahara there was no interruption
in the landscape apart from this tree
making the loneliest circles inside itself
& while salt caravans refused to break
a single bough for fire or tea
& stray camels resisted the lure of its flowers
& though the expanse was made
vaster by this tree’s misplacement
centuries later a scud of desert birds
erupted from its branches in the headlights of a truck
What kind of ancient memory
turns a driver into a ruined moth
or into Odysseus unbound from the mast
& taking helm toward the siren-song of leaves
The night of your death
everything was routine as blossom
A woman held a pocket mirror
& tugged on her eyelid at the bar
The door to the walk-in was left open all morning
& the coils froze
& for hours I chipped ice from the condenser
with a mallet & flathead
The toilet clogged
& no one said anything
What kind of tragedy isn’t marked
by the banal
I have heard that trees speak
to each other through scent
That when a giraffe chews
an umbrella thorn acacia
the tree fills its leaves with toxins
& releases ethylene
which travels on winds
to warn its neighbors
to do the same
& I have read that sycamores
lining a city street
cling to the world
in a similar fashion
their roots pushing impossibly
through compact soil
to suck the sweat
from waterlines & search
for flaws in the pipes
The night of your death
I dreamt I was with you
driving through the desert toward a burning house
& the dream which had seized upon the lack of detail
concerning the circumstances of your death
insisted that the sun become a headlight on a drunken truck
What kind of sun moves closer as it sets
I asked you
The horizon as you understand it
you answered
a separation of earth & sky
is like a poet’s description of the soul:
“an impossibility that has its uses”
& then as the light hit you
a confusion of sparrows rushed from your mouth
I have heard that trees speak
to each other through threads
of fungus beneath the forest floor
that when a sapling
cannot find sunlight
beneath the overstory
larger trees pump sugars
through these networks
from root to root
that a whole forest
is a nursing mother
& yet how often I think of trees
as shipwrecked
as heads above water
their roots pedaling
to keep them afloat
The night of your death
I thought of the ravines we slept in
How twelve thousand years before we woke
to the childlike wailing of cottontail fawns
the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted
to build the lake carving the land
along the way So we’re napping in glacier
tracks you whispered on a bed
of mayapple trillium & oak-shadow
For three nights that summer
we lay beside an ephemeral stream
watching tadpoles twitch like sentences
chewing sumac & writing bad verses
What kind of poem you asked me
says “a tree is not a standing wave”
I have this sense that each thing moves
to become memory or that memory
is what moves to become each thing
& I have this sense that language erodes
memory or that it is memory
that erodes language
& so despite or because of this
I have avoided speaking about you