The Tree

One Dallas morning Mrs. Bollinger

took us, notebooks in hand, out to the trees,

a herd of scared, hormonal, boring kids,

and said: Compare a tree to something else—

make poems! And we made them. In the winding

branches I divined a roller coaster,

its ups and downs, its intricate inversions.

Writing the poem (and therefore the poem)

turned out to be a twisting jaunt itself,

and all seemed interlocked: the tree, the track,

the poem, and the mind that made the poem.

Or anyway, this story is inspired

by true events—all but the wise response

of glad exhilaration. Probably

I felt it was a better class than usual

and went about my day. But twenty years

have passed and I am pondering that tree,

that metaphor, and Mrs. Bollinger.

In a quiet darkness deeper than my knowing,

the seed was laid, and it’s been growing since.