The Shade Tree

From you, I learned the world

does not allow both

in single trunk of flesh,

no matter how many

sun-charred children

you gather under your

wide-swept branches,

no matter how many

crinkled leaves of gold

you rain down into their

hungry open mouths.

This kind of healing

puts a dose of poison

in the roots, it comes

with sterile soil,

with a daily loosening,

and they will never know it,

not even when the trunk

begins to list and groan

in the wind issuing

from their wailing throats.

It would be such a simple lust,

to ache for aching

like they do,

to just give in to it

and ache like they do,

to swallow no one’s pain

but gallons of your own,

to feast on yourself.

Forget this strange nutrition.

Even if it lets your roots

knot their worried fingers

deeper into the hair

of your lover the earth,

even if it brings strength

beneath the earth,

it withers the limbs above.

It shades no one.

It would heal you with a cost:

a shrinking ring of shade,

and the sun rises ever higher,

it burns ever hotter

and here it never sets.

It lays hot on your back, yes,

but it sears these children

of sticks, and they are

already smoking.

Let them huddle closer.

Stretch your limbs

to encompass as many of them

until your bark cracks

with the strain of reaching.

Bathe their bodies, feed them,

and grow dizzy with it,

feel the earth kiss you

even as she loosens your fingers

from clutching so tightly,

teeter and hunch and splinter

but never stop shielding

the blistered beneath you.

How valuable is a shade tree

if it could not

come crashing down

one day?