Elevator in the Forest

Tags

elevator, forest, Oakland, poetry, trees

Machinery grinds, an elevator
descends and comes to a stop;
doors open onto a forest
and a woman gets off; the elevator
goes up and vanishes.

She walks into the forest,
among the oaks, among the sycamores,
taking off her clothes as she goes;
mirrors with ornate frames
hang from the branches,

they don’t show her reflection;
she sings, her voice harmonizing
with the murmur of the stream
and the whisper of the wind
in the trees.

August

Tags

autumn, emotions, nature, poetry, sun, trees

My pagan heart
feels autumn coming,
the sadness of trees

whose leaves,
not now but soon enough,
will drift away,

longer nights,
the sun’s path low and lower,
as light departs.

Forgetting

Tags

Albuquerque, birds, New Mexico, poetry, sexual abuse, trees

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1952

The back of the garage, dim, dusty,
was my father’s makeshift workshop,
a table set between the lawnmower
and the rakes, hoes, pitchfork.
One fall afternoon when I was seven,
I found him there, wearing
his gray and maroon wool jacket,
repairing a lamp. I told him
if he didn’t stop doing those things
to me, I would tell my mother;
he looked at the ax on the wall,
said I’d better not.

Back out in the sunshine slanting
down on our peach trees, next door
the apple orchard, last of the fruit
picked over by birds, I forgot
for forty years the things he’d done
and went on doing. In the garden
the chrysanthemums, ruined by frost,
had been cut to the ground.

Today, Yesterday, and the Day Before

Tags

Love, nature, poetry, trees

Dead air between us,
I can’t hear you, feel you.

The sycamore says
I am held captive in a cave
by the spell of my old certainty,
my first certainty:
all will go wrong,
none will love me,
the sun will turn red
and then black,
the leaves on all of the trees
will twist and turn and fall
in the dark wind.

So now I sit on a stone,
my feet put down roots;
I draw up honeyed sweetness
from the earth
and burst into leaf and flower.
I sing a song,
the dark wind passes,
and you call to me.

The Day I Discovered Happiness

Tags

Albuquerque, apple orchard, Easter, emotions, Love, New Mexico, poetry, trees

Albuquerque, New Mexico 1954

On Easter Sunday when I was nine,
I was ready for church
before the others and I went out
to the side yard, still in shade,
where the purple iris bloomed.
Beyond the wire fence,
the sun shone on the apple orchard
in the next yard: old, knobbly little trees
with few leaves, in the fall, fewer apples.
I loved those trees with a fierce love,
and that day, gazing at them,
I was filled with light and lightness,
I was shining, floating,
who knew which; for once
the real thing, pure, unmixed
with sorrow or guilt or fear:
happiness.