Winter '06
It stood here
for four generations,
fattening its trunk,
unfurling its leaves
eating sunlight. Our
oak, bark-wrinkled,
solid, rising and branching
like bronchial passages,
guarded our street untilyesterday, when we had it chopped down.
Beetles had feasted upon its tender xylem
and a team of tattooed men
came to amputate limbs,
to rip their way down the trunk
with chainsaws, cutting, cutting,
leaving behind a platform,
a stump.They say that each ring represents a year,
and so, my finger, damp with sap,
time-travels back through falling
Twin Towers and the Berlin Wall,
back through Apollo 11, back through
the ringed gravity of Vietnam,
Daly Plaza, Sputnik, the Enola Gay,
back through D-Day and Poland,
back through Charlie Chaplin,
trench warfare, and Kitty Hawk,
tighter now, the rings collapse
towards oblivion,towards a sapling.
I imagine a farmer’s hand,
calloused by dirt.
He plants it here,
a territorial flag,
digging down, down,
letting the tree find its roots
in the black Dakota soil.And now, years forward,
the air is thick with sawdust
as the joking men drive away,
carrying with them
the shade of our tree.
Patrick Hicks teaches Creative Writing at Augustana College and was recently a Visiting Fellow at Oxford. His work has appeared in over fifty publications, and he has enjoyed long residences in England, Northern Ireland, Germany, and Spain. He currently lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he enjoys thunderstorms rolling across the prairie. His first collection of poetry, Traveling Through History, was published in 2005.