The Sea of Trees

The Sea of Trees

There’s so much else---our life.

At the sick times, our slashing,

drastic decisions made us runaways.

                               

                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                Runaway

And in the end that’s all you’d do anyway

or could do as though the path had calcified

had become a one way a penitent road you’d

resoled your worst possible shoes with.

I’d never know how to follow if it weren’t

for the blood.  Because for some flagellants

the shoulders the torso are the landscape

they paint their sins on (or the sins

of others they take on) they escape

into their clouds almost at once and want

to be seen, a fevered masochist.  But others

like you take the wounds into their feet

and walk between the rhododendron

and myrtle.  Twisted and sometimes low

to the ground they remind me of an old

dowager who leans into the conversation

only to be polite not to brag about her upbringing

by a stern nannie dead now sixty years.

These brief moments the light slides--if there is

a light--beside the blooming myrtle

I make good time and don’t fall.  You have two

years on me though.  In your silence.  Remember?

Those last twenty five months or so

you turned down the offer to make words

meaningful or at least less painful.  If you talked at all

it was kitchen knives.  By that time you had

good aim and I was always the perfect

bull’s eye.  If not the red center then the ribs,

where they would wait between the bones

like the mouth of a trap for small game: open,

open, open for seasons at a time and the rust

setting in the jaw.  By the time I make it

this far I’ve forgotten where I started.   You’ve

run away and I’ve lost your trail.  Yesterday I began

to wonder if I’ve been following someone

else’s blood.  It’s viscous thick, a texture

like gunpowder.  I don’t eat much, and only once

in a while.  the trail’s going out and I don’t know

my way.  Your last words were a gurgle, a stream

off course, a garter snake startled in the grass.

Before I could put my finger to your lips, before

I could step on the one square of light, you were

gone.  Not ahead to light the way, just gone.  And I’ve

been all this time walking.  I can’t help myself.