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.

Great