A narrow path overseen by a few
metal benches leads to the massive wonder
this place is named for, limbs the size of trunks,
and a plaque that dates it back to 1650.
Today, beneath that great latticework
of shade, my friends discuss
what is known about the communal
network of roots. Even a stump,
otherwise dead, still shares
what it has with the group. Meanwhile,
my own stingy core keeps replaying
a moment on the phone this morning,
Jean sniping in a way that was so old
and familiar it stung me to silence,
same tone, same words, I swear,
as in that first summer
when I was eighteen and enthralled with her.
Now I’m nearly sixty, she’s newly widowed
and, as she fingers the mottled bark,
I half think it must be illegal
to be pissed at a friend, no, a sister
with a grief that fresh. And yet,
as Sue explains how fungi are the brains
underground, my mind goes
from fungus to fester.
“How do botanists date trees,” Lisa asks,
“when they can’t see the rings?”
I shrug and glance at the gold band
that links Jean to an absence,
then hug my thickening middle
and, with it, the girl I was
who always assumed, whenever
someone was so much as brusque,
it was somehow her fault.
“I can’t get over this thing,” I say, wanting
to mean the sycamore. All it has felt
in its almost four hundred years.
All it must know and have forgiven.
