Two Trees
By Joanna Klink
The shuffling of feet, then,
was my own, and the leaps of water
in a day otherwise listing with rain.
Of the mirrors inside my home
I asked what is my worth.
Overloved, the panes of silver showed me
nothing but myself from various
angles, touching my cheek,
smiling and extinguished.
I cannot even mourn what seems to live there.
I know another grammar holds me
but not together, and I miss
looking for it, forget, even,
to look. A few carmine clouds
just within vision ... some women by the road
gathering trash. My life, imperceptible,
like bells of heat on skin early in the day,
or the smell of eucalyptus
I can’t place. I am always
unsure. Merely in attendance
on the good days. I press my ear
to the wooden door and hear
something flame in the white
filigreed leaves.
___
I felt far from anything that
mattered. The routine of a day loses
force—you work, clean up and eat,
plunging to sleep—what happened to those hours.
Those hours were yours and they still
pulse with heat and dream, like brown
butterflies lifting from dense twigs.
Some days I’m nothing more than hearsay,
a story read back to me that makes no sense.
In front of screens I feel my eyes turn
dusty, my grief diffuse. But sometimes
when I sense a slight shaking in the magnolia tree
I’m the girl staring at something on the lawn
her family cannot see, unfolding in layers of air
and water, close to everything
unspoken—a pause, a stare, a slow
movement of hand around a tool.
A voice taking time to say Good-bye or No more,
the sudden ease of speaking with a neighbor,
which was hard the day before. They spoke
easily with one another—their lives were words
that held in summer air, their thoughts leaden
and complex, their answers poor, their need
punishing, and huge, while the sidewalks themselves
were hot, the stone walls cool,
and just before dawn animals scavenged
for water in highway ditches, feeling their bones
flash inside their own fierce thirst.
