What kind of life is the pine leading now—
not Lear on the heath or Richard in the tower.
Is it my father’s life at the end of life?
The slowed-down heartbeat of a northern bear,
slumbers broken by sharp waking, eyes
wide with the self that resides within?
When lightning struck our white pine, a fissure
halved her, rain of needles in our neighbor’s
pool—her verdant green gone rust-red.
Without a crown, her rough beauty undone,
the tree men scaled her to a high stump.
Confined, she’s nothing like herself.
Her long roots radiate across the yard.
She roams like a mad starfish under the earth,
some roots surface, hard as sea ropes with salt.
They tip above the lawn, nearly trip me
as I head out with peels of beet to feed
the compost. Teabags, carrots, winter’s
kindling for the next season’s feast: a butternut
fattens under a canopy, a fig brings bees
and elephantine leaves. All morning, windfall
into the hearth, I watch it blaze a torrent
of words, a snow-white semblance.
Singe of lichen spackles a fallen branch.
The fire keeps. My father sleeps upright
in his chair, I wake him with the oldest stories.
First the scuffed blue rowboat, then the beetle-cat.
Four of us scrapping for holds on the tiller,
my brother alive, the hair in his eyes.
Wind picks up offshore, our centerboard hums.
Hard-to-lee, hairsbreadth to the channel,
all we’d never know flying beneath us.
