An Avenue of Elms
—Painting by English Painter John Nash (1893-1977)
—Painting by English Painter John Nash (1893-1977)
ELMS
—Dennis Schmitz
I’m not sleeping really in my former
home but sleeping in my self until
the Iowa in me—or one street, my street,
leads me, longing, to the older body’s
morning. It’s my brother’s house now.
This would’ve been my bedroom window
in which the wind is all verb, & sun,
finite but in a thousand leaves,
flicks & flicks. Eat, my brother urges,
then walk, & so we talk still negotiating
our fit. Where he’s monosyllabic, I perfect,
disappoint as we go, a lower-case praise
of trees, the neighborhood’s necrotic Dutch
elm victims, scions dying on the warty galls.
Praise the blurt & syncopated chaff of chain
saws: the city’s culling that I was bred for—
metaphorically I am cut but not cut down,
happy just to be, sixty-five but still
preliminary. Now our walk is transition,
board-game rules: one step back, two steps
into complicity as the crew-chief signals
our way through the downed trees, prone trunks
(really just torsos), limbs gnawed arm-length
& then all into the rusted truck-bed, a coarse spew
that blows back on two workers who feed
the chipper. Chuang Tzu’s wise man is a tree
that grows big because its trunk is too twisted
for coffin-lids, leaves poisonous when the disciple
licked one. The crew-chief’s face is clamped
in a parenthesis his ear-protectors make, a moral
deafness—are the saws so loud that he can’t hear
the trees scream? We walk on. What used to be
is knotted in the roots of what is—the bedroom’s
sick elm where sun once flooded my boyhood.
__________________
—Medusa, with gratitude to Dennis Schmitz for bringing me, as so many others, into the world of poetry
—Dennis Schmitz
I’m not sleeping really in my former
home but sleeping in my self until
the Iowa in me—or one street, my street,
leads me, longing, to the older body’s
morning. It’s my brother’s house now.
This would’ve been my bedroom window
in which the wind is all verb, & sun,
finite but in a thousand leaves,
flicks & flicks. Eat, my brother urges,
then walk, & so we talk still negotiating
our fit. Where he’s monosyllabic, I perfect,
disappoint as we go, a lower-case praise
of trees, the neighborhood’s necrotic Dutch
elm victims, scions dying on the warty galls.
Praise the blurt & syncopated chaff of chain
saws: the city’s culling that I was bred for—
metaphorically I am cut but not cut down,
happy just to be, sixty-five but still
preliminary. Now our walk is transition,
board-game rules: one step back, two steps
into complicity as the crew-chief signals
our way through the downed trees, prone trunks
(really just torsos), limbs gnawed arm-length
& then all into the rusted truck-bed, a coarse spew
that blows back on two workers who feed
the chipper. Chuang Tzu’s wise man is a tree
that grows big because its trunk is too twisted
for coffin-lids, leaves poisonous when the disciple
licked one. The crew-chief’s face is clamped
in a parenthesis his ear-protectors make, a moral
deafness—are the saws so loud that he can’t hear
the trees scream? We walk on. What used to be
is knotted in the roots of what is—the bedroom’s
sick elm where sun once flooded my boyhood.
__________________
—Medusa, with gratitude to Dennis Schmitz for bringing me, as so many others, into the world of poetry
Dennis Schmitz (1937-2019)
To see the recent Sacramento Bee
article about
Dennis, Sacramento's first co-Poet Laureate
who
passed away last Friday, go to
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
