this morning tree is heavy with dawn
& in between the flush & future of promise & the pact
of pledges kept & abandoned – today’s
& tomorrow’s futures hidden as a fore edge painting
in an ancient picture book makes me think
on sacrifice & meditation & saints stripped & pincered
Queen Hedwig marking her place in her prayer book
with curled palm or the bee sting ridge
of possibility swelled up on my index finger
& my name named from an old testament
meaning bitter in grief after death & mourning/ the only lesson
of a natural life this morning struggling

ash phantom appears as necks & arms & shoulders
carried high shrugging in the altitudes of endurance
& vestige what we hoped for when we planted/ nurtured
fifty saplings or was it more those years ago
& our common griefs leveling us the way soft
slate slabs make a trammeled walkway/ our footsteps
wearing/ indenting a path did I ever ask
what you see when the moon is full & coyote howls
& early bird black bear climbs the lowest branches
reaching for unripe pears never caring
to wait for that moment of perfection or bombastic
barred owl raptor perched & loudly murmuring
past sundown – now that one can wait & wait
for acres of opportune forests & open giving given –

& yes I know we’re not supposed to anthropomorphize
a mammal siesta in a summer afternoon’s
groggy fever but I’m old now & to hell
with all that I’m here & they’re with me
I am nothing without them & I tend their garden
as my own with salvaged arms of sunup tree’s
offshoots as tendon & bicep brachialis & pronator
palmaris & flexor reaching every hour for the blue
that gives this range its name for dominant brother
sister mother father spruce & fir of cooler
climes eons retreated to ridges & peaks
so that only a hundred square miles of evanescence
mapped on my back etched in gray metal
of a body’s memory remain

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

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