The Oak Tree
There used to be a big oak tree leading to the house where I grew up. It was broad and thick, but didn’t overreach. It just was. It marked the end of a long driveway, along a road with many such driveways, so when we directed someone to the house, we always said, “turn into the driveway with the big oak tree, and go all the way to the end.”
They cut down the tree a few years after we stopped living there. I think the city said they had to. My aunt and uncle still lived on the same property, and later my grandparents too. So I had to turn up that same driveway, which felt all wrong without the tree. I didn’t know how to give directions anymore, either. I started to say, “turn when you see an empty space where there should be a tree.”
I couldn’t see the place any other way.
The Bridge
I didn’t know you well.
Didn’t even really like you--
if we’re being honest.
But here you are
ten years later.
To think--if you’d lived
I’d have forgotten you long ago.
But instead I still wonder
about the bridge that let you go
and the water that swallowed you.
If you were afraid
or changed your mind.
They say it happens.
I remember
your father’s voice on the phone,
the hollowness of it.
Gathering together
your toothbrush and alarm clock,
apples and coffee mug.
The striking banality of
things left behind.
Poem II
the other day i wrote a poem
but i was drinking in a red room
and i think I lost it.
now someone will read it under the dim lamps
and wonder why,
on the back of a tiny menu,
there is writing
beginning with the words:
“I’m so scared of imaginary things”
and continuing with nightmares of spiders
and waking up cold.
i forget how it ends.
drinking this time wasn’t like the last time—
with the whiskey sours
when grief made me scratch my own hands
bloody.
this time it was just for fun.
until i lost the damn poem.