"What the Chestnut Tree Saw"
The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew ..., and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn’t speak.
–Anne Frank
Lone trees. Skies full of soundless limbs.
Your shape through the skylight--
pale knees crossed like driftwood
bones. I see you clearly
through my branches, each morning
your face a small bird. Hands darting
in dips and starts over pages
of a pink checkered book. Your eyes
track the swoop and lunge of gulls across
the window until it lingers beneath
your lids. Spring evenings, miner moths
flutter and lay their cunning eggs. I glimpse you
in moonlight--the silvered eyes,
wide mouth open and waiting as you lay
in his arms. I see canals stretch like felled trees,
a city quietly cut at the knees. The red face
of the clock tower that booms the quarter hour.
Then a day that follows any other night,
a sun rises, a tank halts and spills
its black-clotted men. The last scampering
in the attic. You leave in a brown twill coat.
Look up at me, then away.
After the battle of rot, fifty years
of fungus and infested moths. Afraid
I will fall on the old attic, they saw my limbs,
then the trunk. Extract the roots.
A crane lifts me up, branches grazing
the rooftops the way a boy’s knees touch
a girl’s. What Spring has done to us—
white candleblooms and their pale buds open, then burst.
© 2008 Lois P. Jones
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