Big Poplar, a white pillar now
winter is coming. . .
and the way cross-country is easy to find,
since so many leaves are off the trees
and gentle the feel of my steps forward,
so many plants have had to die back till spring,
I particularly don’t miss the rank poke weed,
and I don’t like the idea of it returning
when Persephone returns from Hades,
we climb half an hour up from the road
to the Big Poplar, a lonely remnant of the great old growth
that covered these slopes till the last 200 years
during which the wood within their trunks,
and the land below them which could be farmed for corn,
led to the axe and saw domesticating the primeval forest,
for decades I have visited this huge tulip poplar tree,
over 22 feet in circumference, high up a hollow,
butting up against a stone cliff,
I treasured it as a last survivor
who helped me remember what was lost
when farms and lumber companies asserted themselves,
now the Big Poplar is dead:
a white monolith whose size and shape
still remember who it was in life,
but the rot, the loss, the forgetting, are setting in,
our aging bodies again pull us up to the Big Poplar,
and it’s hard to not feel the pull of letting go
that calls to all living things,
we also feel the pull to rise as high and strong
as we still can,
to not yet slip back into the past,
and to let the future do as it will.
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