Reading instructions: STOP. No, really, don’t scroll. Don’t let your eyes touch this poem unless you are alone, or at least in a place where you feel comfortable reading outloud.
You must be reading this poem outloud the first time you experience it. Or you must hear it from someone. Perhaps go to my source, the sadly-silent podcast All Up in Your Ears, and listen to episode two and hear it read to you. Please don’t read it before you speak it or hear it. Not this one.
That’s the proper way to approach most poetry, of course, and you know this, of course. But who hews to best practices at all times? Not me: I read poems on the bus with headphones in but not on; I read them on the quiet floor of the university library because, unjustly, that is also the poetry floor; I read them in class when the light from outside fails to mix with the overhead fluorescence and I can’t listen or speak because the feeling of it is like the sound of walking through broken glass in a parking lot. I get it. I read new poems silently all the time and it’s fine, of course, and you know this, of course, because the only real rule of reading poetry is that you should need it.
So disregard my instructions, if you need to. I only give them because I want you to have the experience that I had when I first heard this poem: that sharp physical wrench of beauty when a line or a stanza catches you. By surprise, yes, but also and or: catches your breath, catches you out of the air out of a soar or a fall, catches you like a fish or a cold or a trap. This poem did that for me, several times.
Maybe it won’t do this for you. There isn’t any universal to this. But I hope it does. “I picked it out just because I find it consoling,” said the voice who read it to me, as introduction. Me too.
Dusk fell every night. Things
fall. Why should I
have been surprised.
Before it was possible
to imagine my life
without it, the winds
arrived, shattering air
and pulling the tree
so far back its roots,
ninety years, ripped
and sprung. I think
as it fell it became
unknowable. Every day
of my life now I cannot
understand. The force
of dual winds lifting
ninety years of stillness
as if it were nothing,
as if it hadn’t held every
crow and fog, emptying
night from its branches.
The needles fell. The pinecones
dropped every hour
on my porch, a constant
irritation. It is enough
that we crave objects,
that we are always
looking for a way
out of pain. What is beyond
task and future sits right
before us, endlessly
worthy. I have planted
a linden, with its delicate
clean angles, on a plot
one tenth the size. Some change
is too great.
Somewhere there is a field,
white and quiet, where a tree
like this one stands,
made entirely of
hovering. Nothing will
hold me up like that again.
snowghoul
dededos
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
prguitarman
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
