JESSICA HORNIK's poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Verse, The Southern Review, and many other journals. She appeared in Slope #2. THE LYING TREE 1. In a forest where the under branches of evergreens send funereal limbs into the sunless lower air, there is a tree whose smooth trunk rises to about the height of two women, then diverges-one cannot say branches, for there are no branches-into two still rising, symmetrical curves. Anyone passing by on the trail would see the resemblance to a lyre. 2. By the time the tree had stood lifeless for longer than it had been alive, it had become a meeting place for lovers who required the privacy of the tented grove. In spring they were lured by the scented blossoms of blackhaw and the drooping delicacy of the yellow adderstongues, which grew closer to the kill, away from the sun-refusing pines. A boy could upturn the flower's center to his eyes, then lift, in turn, his eyes to the girl's . . . And the lyre, because stringless and not given to music, seemed instead to listen, an instrument inverted to become an ear. 3. A dead tree among live ones is as a lyre to the instruments of an ongoing civilization. One summer evening, a girl rushed through the jewelweed tilting along the kill to meet a boy at the usual place. Through its bowed arms the lyre had heard the promise the boy had recited on an earlier evening, a promise that resonated for the girl as vow. It was never learned what exactly he said that night, but everyone soon knew the girl had been taken in by a liar. The boy came to be regarded as a scoundrel. Other girls, shaken now by their suspicions, preferred to be walked around the town green rather than held in the arms of boys by the arms of a silent, but, for all they knew, malevolent phenomenon of nature. 4. Compare, for instance, the legend of the prince who, to prove his devotion to his love, reached for a handful of cliff-side yellow-eyed blue beauties and, toppling to his death, called to her forget me not. Girls grow up knowing never to meet their boys at the lying tree. But they do not know, nor can their parents tell them, exactly why the tree is said to be a liar, and to turn good boys into liars too. It no longer matters that, eventually, the bowed arms will break and fall, killing all resemblance to anything living or dead. HE CAME ONCE A YEAR TO SEE THE LEAVES He came once a year to see the leaves and mourn the loss of a love. He was never sure if the purple weeds lining the roadside were heather. The lakes he saw lying back like a woman's shoulders in the dusk inspired him to a grief only the leaves could mimic. Why they left him, always, at the end of summer, he couldn't fathom. The new moon abstained. In rented cars he rescued the desert islands of cheap motels from the risk of random cheer. CHRONOLOGY That April morning the sun fit a halo to the sink's orphan white, a brightness that seemed a transmitter of future light. And here you still stand, a hinge between two versions of a chronology: The years that might have happened sail permanently back to the place where the river acquires a name. And the years that have- They stumble like a woman stepping out of the bath- she grabs hold of the sink, reassembles her nerve, looks at the spot on the floor that will take her next step. |