A Maple, A Rising, Late May Sun

A Maple, A Rising, Late May Sun

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

…with the sun already

going…

and the water…

in the earth…

over its leaves

          W. S. Merwin "Place" 

The sun is the palm of your hand sliding up the rough

trunk of a three hundred year old maple—at least

the arborist said three hundred, the one who’d come, I haven't told anyone,

to diagnose the heart rot, how much time it’s got before

we should do the right thing and have it cut down.  But

that was when the sun, palm of your hand, was still the night, and her skirts

unseasonably below freezing for so late in May, and we’d thought

the early hot-house starts would keep

their white frost forever or at least until they simply

fainted from it all and fell over, out of breath, like the too

corseted ladies in a sweat at the king’s coronation. 

Look, though!  the canopy is throbbing green.  Yes it was

a sluggish start, all old trees, aren’t they slow to open, and don’t

they want that slightly-palsied-wise-hand dance to wake

the both of them, the fingers on the thigh, because the winter’s been

long and May after this April's been somewhat peculiar…

But briefly,

and as I wondered about other things, I looked into the east

and because it was cold and because it was wet, and the clematis

and the peony were a fist in their petaled cell, I thought about them

opening early, and the cold rain building a chill, but I noticed

the waist of the maple absolutely steaming with you, the way, I’ve said, you rose

up her thigh and the night dreams, having long penetrated her

thick bark, were coming undone, and I had to stand

back to see because close up it’d seemed to stop all together,

but away a yard or so it was all veil rising up, steam a breath,

steam a need, steam enough to stay, gently, the blades

and the cranes…and I thought: if we’d all had such choices

of those we let inside of us, I’d want that same hand that found my last

leaf last fall, and every fall, to touch me, beneath and out

of view of the street, in the retreat I’d been defending all along, but not knowing

not knowing before this very second look back beside the peony and clematis.