Birches

From their long white trunks
brighter than winter air,
their dark eyes watching,

motionless, without judgment
as I walk the rough stone driveway.
I know these eyes are wounds

healed over, or scars
from branches lost.
And I know the language

between us is untranslatable.
But for the entire three-mile hike
I sense their eyes behind me

holding me, as I might hold
an over-full glass of water,
meniscus trembling in the winter sky

measuring me as I grow smaller
by the mailbox, letter in my hand.
And though at a great distance

I can feel them taking in
the loops and dips in the black script
of the address and its return,

as I might observe
without distinction wreaths
of moss around their trunks

if I were focusing on something else
or everything at once.

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Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ “poem-a-day” series, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s third full-length collection, Echolocation, was published by Plume editions/MadHat Press in March 2018.