"Dry Tree" and Other Poems
by Lauren Davis
DRY TREE
Today the wind came
and knocked all the dead
and weak
trees
down.
On the way out to the country,
roads are blocked,
fire and ambulance men
work to remove the fallen—
little yellow sleeves, cuffs, hardhats,
and hems speckled inside a conglomeration of branches.
You used to cry;
everything that made you human
was disoriented/
You were once that down tree, stretched across the road,
and the one at the edge
of the riverbank, begging the wind
to roll and fold you in.
Vertebrae bruised by rock,
chest-rib bones
so prominent under skin
that your chest would vibrate with fear
at the surface, nothing to protect
what was underneath fluttering, brittle/
You were once named Willowy
by that Chinese medicine doctor:
You, all full of wind and swaying,
hanging down and cracking,
limbs cracking arid,
body-dry,
mind-dry,
and the policemen did come, and the firemen did come,
to pick you up, to lift you,
at your strident shoulder blades and rear: a stiff plank.
You were a place
where
no verve was evident, no healthy borers,
no robin songs, no squirrels nesting.
You awoke in that hospital bed, eyes blinking,
to someone who stood their then,
but, months later, would not stand still—
a visitor to your life.
People don’t always stand
where they once said
they always would, trees fall,
down,
souls fall,
people say they meant that then
but now don’t mean anything at all.
What makes us happy; is it purpose,
is it our wild brains, healthy? Is it fostering ourselves,
is it acceptance? Is it letting go what was before
and knowing that now, we can fight firmer?
Is it knowing we will and can actually make it
through this life alone,
that dying alone is nothing but the safety of being human?
All debris collects
somewhere: something,
after some time, a tiny, new light,
a spruce, a seed, a morsel,
as we know,
but so often don’t believe.
When my brain was broken, I read it could never repair.
Yet, here it is again,
full of tiny, healthy sparks,
full of making, full of water flowing,
a river which could never
dry out, nor collapse.
You, self, will never dry out
nor collapse again.
No.
A river runs through you.
Sleeping Through the Earthquake
Falling asleep
anywhere I could—
floors of basements,
clothes piles in closets
couches near gun shots,
tents in wildernesses,
cars abandoned,
attics, RVs, or barn lofts of friends—
I’d long for the slumber
and wake of home,
the nest it was before
I wanted to fall from it.
The faraway hum
of the train and coyote howl,
the pieces of hay
brought in by
the open window’s palm
to rest on my cheek,
the soft-air close of the backdoor,
my father leaving for work,
the neigh of horses
and the swish of their white tails,
my mother singing
Sweet Baby James
over vacuuming.
One morning
I woke up
on a friend’s porch,
wrists through the spindles,
to my telephone ringing,
a voice which was my mother
asking why
I hadn’t answered throughout the night.
She said she’d been pacing
hours barefoot
on the farmhouse floors,
calling to warn me
about the earthquake.
Before it hit
she’d had a nightmare
that a crack split the earth open,
making a canyon
that forever separated
mothers from their young.
In the dream
I had fallen
off the bed of the ground,
rolled into the mouth
and turned there into a woman.
Watching Them Swim
In the Voice of a Friend
I sit on the speedboat
with a beer bottle resting on my knee,
as friends strip off their clothes,
and one by one jump
into the interrupted lake,
laughing
with the delight of liberty.
As the girls swim,
long hair twists
in the clear liquid,
weeds catch the strands,
heads bob:
It’s like a prayer that dips
atop then under the water,
each time farther away,
each time breathing out
at the surface
with the sound of spewing.
One of my buddies turns on his back,
his round face mirroring the sun,
legs pumping
somewhere underneath
like an otter tail.
Their chests fill with oxygen
and their bodies float
at the surface of the water.
They look like my bedridden mother:
Her frail arms that rested above linens
when I made the bed around her
as if she wasn’t even there.
When I said I was leaving town
for a few days
she said I should be ashamed
for leaving her.
Sometimes I’m afraid
to look at her face.
At nightfall
we return to land to set up our tents
while the couple in the lot next to us
fights in a language I don’t recognize.
Their son comes over
to visit us. I ask him
what the best part of his day was.
He asks me to answer first.
I tell him it was the hours
I spent watching my friends swim.
He says he played in the woods
and that his mother watched,
smiling as he climbed a rock
that was a ladder to the sun.
What Ourselves Have Figured Out
I knelt
in the fern garden
just this spring
in early year
to pluck fiddle heads
to eat
and on my tongue
their reptile texture
turned to a taste
of sweet, fertile leaf.
Now, in later year
they’ve matured
and reach nearly my knee
as I sit on my chair
to draw
out
in the violent-orange air.
It so slows my breath
today to draw
in the garden
that I recline quickly into sleep
and although I drew
there before I fell:
the ferns that had grown so tall
the purple shades,
the auburn air and teal—
I dreamt that the rain had come
and that I slept through
giant, supple droplets
full and indigo
like the eyes of daughters
descending from the sky
so forgivingly only around me,
falling so slowly that
they hang
in the atmosphere
and all I had painted
washed away,
the ferns
and all the colors;
instead so boldly under
a red umbrella
appeared
as if it could hide
from me the rain.
But it never rose
from the paper,
a tenderhearted bud,
it laid flatter
than my back
against my chair,
and it was then
that I was not sure
what was a dream
at all.
All the times
I create
I draw
layer
after layer,
each year
the seasons come
layer
after layer.
Neither I
nor the seasons
forget
what was before.
Only each of us make
a joyous rebirth
of what ourselves have figured out.
Back in spring
those ferns
tickled my tongue
and now
they’re at my knee.
Next spring,
what will they taste like;
how far will they reach;
and what will I draw
to lie back to dream?
No matter the answer,
all the while
underneath me
the world continues.