For my brother, Joe
For nearly two hundred years,
it drew strength from this place,
but lately its crown of branches
looks sparser every fall—with broken
and diseased limbs—and its massive trunk
surrounded by an ocean of black asphalt.
On a small curbed island
of hard-packed urban dirt,
where tiny cubes of broken windshield glass
outnumber last year’s acorns,
it stands like an abandoned watchtower,
a lighthouse without a keeper.
In the canopy above,
clusters of parasitic mistletoe drain
its remaining sap, and yet this oak
endures, spared perhaps as a token,
some landscape designer's sentimental nod
to an older kind of seasonal longing.
And perhaps it’s only poetry to imagine
that this ancient tree must long for its compatriots,
a lost forest of the harvested—
chestnut, maple, larch, and pine—
or wonder why an unlucky few seem fated
to die upright, slowly, and alone.
Michael Colonnese
Michael Colonnese is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, a hard-boiled detective novel with a soft Jungian underbelly, and of two prize-winning poetry collections, Temporary Agency and Double Feature. He lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.
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