The path of bricks covered in dirt
Beneath the bush beside our house
Which stood on the left hand of town
Never experienced love
The iris garden less than twenty feet away
Bloomed once a year and often
Died before its life began
Thanks to early warmth and a late freeze
A tree in our back yard was so gargantuanly old
That I could have hollowed it out and launched it to the moon
And the relatively young maple tree in front of our house
Managed to support the weight of a teenager
Reading Harry Potter in that bindle of a hammock
For hours upon days upon a time
I tend to forget about the tree that got sick
Who looked displaced from the streets of New Orleans
Whose arms reached for the ruins of the haunted house across the street
And left a useless stump where they sawed it from the world
I lived there for seven years
Eleven years ago
And I still need to cut the grass
And climb more of the branches I never got around to
April 5th, 2019
The Favoring Wind 