Good Friday

Good Friday

How long were you there

before I remembered you

as the birds did each year

when I saw you

you were already old

                        from “Old Plum Tree”

                        W. S. Merwin

I have known trees I have needed

to climb into, their rough skin my skirt—

I’d watch some bug, dutiful ant maybe,

creep between the layers, pause,

redirect, pause again, and turn to the new

course, though maybe she’d done that

a thousand times before I arrived.  Birch

in my back yard, you must be three

hundred years old, some spots ruptured, calloused bark

a gruff touch, gold cambium tender

as a baby’s cheek.  Yellow, pealing like ceiling

paper, we’d strip long swaths of you,

your skin a healing sunburn we’d pull

steady without the jerked way we’d pick at scabs,

and we’d fold you into long crosses, each one

a ruler long, a starboard and a bow pinched and tied

with black yarn stolen from the basket

by my mother’s television chair.  We had no rivers

but we did have a whole ocean spilling in,

and no matter where the tide was we’d cut out

for the beach and wade into the Bay-fed cove

and watch those little cross/boats

bob once, then glide and never sink.  And our we cradled

their dripping undone-flat-as-they-started selves,

all that saturated sog, lost, those strings

too tight a tear.  All that water seeped in and it was back

to the tree, our steeped little things drowned,

unresuscitateable, dripping like hair on a just dunked

just risen head.  It was more than those boats I wanted

though.  I couldn’t fit onto any of them anyway.  It was

branches I wanted, a couple of low ones, so I could pull

myself up into them, when they were leafy,

when her canopy was green and her great folds

of drapes could make me sail away due south

away from winter, from leaky little dories. 

Firm as her roots were, there would be enough wind

so that the whole great Leviathan of her punctured

the sky and I, parting her bristling baleen

was her first mate.

Sometimes it had to be enough to stand

beneath it all and look up.  It had to be enough

when what was wanted was out of reach, when ladders

were too heavy to haul out, when it was beyond

my ken to nail short two x fours into a trunk

just to rise.  After all the sound

ships have sailed, after all the crew’s on leave,

after all the forgivin’s been done it had to be

enough to stay a little while longer in a garden

holding hands, remembering a salve's

ride to heaven in that birch-bark boat.