​The Arboriculturist


Wanting shade
I made a tree:

first, an old step
ladder, wooden
with one missing slat.

For leaves, I took
pages of books
I found discarded
next to the washing machine.

Pictures from magazines
stood for blossoms;
a torn photograph
I forgot to burn
hung like ripened fruit.

But what shall I use
for roots to anchor
my surrogate sapling
this artifice of bark,
sap, and heartwood?





Ficus Benghalensis


I like the quiet blue house    
at the end of the block,
the one next to the tall banyan tree:
            
they say Jack Kerouac
lived there ‘57 to ‘58
and wrote The Dharma Bums
on one long continuous scroll

like some beat Bedouin
scribe burying sacred texts
inside pottery jars
in the back of caves — 

sharing space with his mother,
typewriter and a bottle,
sometimes he felt
so cramped he slept

in the backyard
beneath the dangling roots
of the banyan tree

like a priest or goat herder
dreaming of America
in the long paragraph
of the past:

Orlando, the dead sea,
the hanging gardens of Babylon.





Cherry Trees


Down a foot worn path
on the outskirts of the forest
the cherry trees stood
surrounding an abandoned field
some farmer had left
to the sun, wild grain, and dandelion fuzz.

Picking cherries, the sun
beat on our backs
as my uncle held me
among the branches, my limbs stained 
red with cherry blood,
my shirt stuck to my skin
with the sun’s hot breath.

One day we took a different path home
our pails bumping together,
brimming with cherries
full of sun and juice and pits
to the home of a woman, 
an old friend, my uncle said,
and gave her a bag of our stolen fruit.

Later, I heard, this woman
would sing to her chickens
before she wrung their necks,
and bare her breasts to the sun,
loving life, she said; 
then disappeared
from memory for thirty years,
until I brought her back,
wrinkled and naked, 
yearning for the warm
juice of fresh-picked fruit, the skin
of old men, and young boys asleep
on the neck of a bird.



​
The Woodcutter's Axe


The wood cutter works alone
in the forest — even the birds 
fall silent
at the clack-clack of his axe.    

He shifts his weight    
to his good knee
and pauses in mid-chop.

At the well, the girl
drinks from a cup
lowered into the water
twenty feet below

bringing it to her lips
she tastes blood, sawdust,
her father’s saliva — 
the woodcutter’s axe.

​
-all poems from my chapbook, THE ARBORICULTURIST, which was published in 2010 by Amsterdam Press.