And this poem is for Allie.
I said I promised to read it for her.
This is from Undertow, which is my first book.
Summer is the season for cutting back.
My father's mower roars and drones, the edge of evening
frayed beyond its use.
Puff balls haunt the graying lawn.
I hear the grass' faint, nocturnal cries.
As if it mattered, as if it could have mattered.
A small bag filled with small things, hidden and discovered.
Is this yours?
After only an hour had elapsed.
Summer, my father tells me, is the time for pruning back.
Every tree around us bears this scar.
I watch him from the cherry tree.
Its black and supple limbs, the sad moss
mounded thickly at the root.
The ladder of the lower branches cut
and always my difficult climb.
I could not stop.
I could not be stopped.
A small girl filled with small things, a spider
on the leaf, the bark's rough curl.
The sudden sun receding from the trees.
Or say not I, but she.
Not he, but they.
She searches in the dusk while someone shouts, then
slips toward the wooded edge as if she would lift the grass
and slide beneath.
Then let them call and call.
There's nothing in their voices that
could love the dark mass of the elms, the gathered birds.
She hovers in the hour resolute.
The leaves become a temple of gray light.
Cherry branches touch her thighs.
The bony roots of trees extend, but slowly, coldly,
something ancient waits.
And it is this to which she is betrothed.