It's Still Life

Various Degrees of Green

I hope that I am never
disappointed in spring,
that medical grade neon green
stripped of its mortality

it’s noisy and brash, and yet I painted green on the wall to reflect calm and quiet, bring outdoors … In. But spring green is anything but quiet. It’s a noise that pops and pulls at your ears like too many words thrown at your feet. Spring laughs and laughs and laughs. And then it dissolves into summer.

my father keeps dissolving.
nuances. fragments. his scent.
he died fifteen years ago today.

should I light candles.
pray for him.
I wonder who will pray for me.

I have learned to self-soothe,
to balance on a pinhead.

my father,
he’s the sunlight on grass

and when he died, for that moment, the world stopped. But the sky didn’t fall, and robins still tugged at the soil, and thankfully January and February with their shortened days crept toward spring. The thrushes returned. Snowdrops and daffodils pushed up into sunlight. Everything comes back for spring.

did I mention that
I name trees.
it makes me feel connected.

three of them, in particular,
the most beautiful trees
I’ve ever seen.

I have a childhood tree,
named it when I was ten.
I knew its leaves,
the feel of its thick bark.

I still remember its name,
although Dad chopped it
down many decades ago.

is that why we name things,
so that we remember,
after all those years,
and in spite of everything

Grandpa said, Don’t make friends with a crow. They’re psychotic, demanding attention. Tapping on the window at all hours. There’s a tree outside my bedroom window that does that when the wind blows. Tap. Tap. Tap. On the window. In the rain. In the moonlight. Just like a crow. We all have our moments.

I inhaled one of those headaches
that tips you forward into a toilet.
it chips off pieces of your skull
into little broken shards of ice

and as I knelt there, staring and wrung limp, I noticed the grey and amber and violet veins in the marble tiles on the floor. Like stiffened tree limbs. Or scorched nerves. I saw the aftermath of a forest fire that looked like that. I remember a voice deep inside me whispering, oh my god.