Tree Year #24

Because I’ll be in Harrodsburg all today, I took my dogwood photos about 6:30 on Friday. Hubby had been shooting photos of his work to submit to an exhibition, so the first shot I took was set on very slow lens. The result was rather intriguing. Unfortunately for me, my face-recognition instinct sets in real quick:

So once I got over my “who broke the camera” moment, I reset the lens to automatic and got this rather nice (I think) photo:

And finally, sundogs on the dogwood:

For a poem, a real treat used by permission of theauthor/ merican Sweetgum is” from Sally Rosen Kindred’s No Eden (Mayapple, 2011), an excellent collection.

American Sweetgum

Here it stands, finally, in the chapter marked
Flowering Trees, and I’m afraid to read
the words, as if their spiny tongues could curl
to touch heartwood, that underbark where the sap
no loner goes. As if from this static strip of print
my mother could rise gripping the yard’s black bench
and throw her cigarette into the grass and twist her foot
over it like a Spanish dancer, and I’d be left
sitting under the American Sweetgum,
my knees pricked by its fruits, bitter spheres, wired
as they are with the sweetgums of my children’s
children, except that I will bear no children,
I will lift my small empty body from this place
like those seeds borne in dried globes and on flowers
nobody remembers anyway. The parched print
says nothing of September, that year
she left beer for wine, nothing of the safety
of the leaves’ fingered reds, the fissured wood, crunch
of fruit—we called them gumballs—the skate key
swinging cold on my neck as I lay
in the cracked grass, white Nova
pulling up, brother swinging eyes-down
out its grimy door, father stalking just behind,
the racket of birds in the drive
wheeling in dust. After all that dense passing:
the hose’s stilled twist in dirt, wronged sounds
from inside, ants retreating to hills by the asphalt’s edge.
I killed one there with a flat basketball,
looking up then but not seeing the hair-tender
undersides of the lobed leaves,
not knowing the bark is stripped, boiled
and pressed to yield a resinous oil. God
might or might not be there, in the firm grasp
through the cloven air, the whisk of leaves anointed
from their start beneath the tree’s skin. I didn’t ask
the trunk and narrow crown how I could pay
for what I’d done, and the sweetgum stood,
thirsty skin leaning for wind, stood there
not saying my name, not even turning its starry hands.

— Sally Rosen Kindred, from No Eden (Mayapple Press 2011), originally published in Ruminate (link to PDF file, TOC only).