Some months ago,
an early morning between winter and spring,
a gray sky.
No, powder blue.
No, white.
No color.
But the earth—
thawed, with the snow melt soaked in—
is dark.
Espresso dark.
Black like it’d stain hands.
And steaming.
Like the puff of breath from behind that house.
No sign of a person, and yet…
But the elm tree—
it’s half leafed out, half not.
Half heavy and dangling with growth,
the other half like spider fingers holding empty space.
See-through.
Bugs are eating it inside out,
its branches blistering white ooze from their bore marks.
The tree is dying,
but only halfway there.
There’s a black bird hiding in its lush part,
screeching unseen.
I squint hard to see it through the thick leaves—
a head, its tail…
if I just look closely enough,
write closely enough,
the black bird will reveal itself whole and cut across the sky like a pen to paper.
Maybe it’ll join the hundreds of starlings that are silently migrating across the dusk sky,
dotting it like tiny, twinkling black stars.
The friendship bracelet I braided for her at the beginning of summer has faded to pastels.
She combs her own hair now.
And paints her own nails.
Freckles mark our days in the sun.
Moths fly across the windshield like burnt pieces of paper.
There’s a drying out. And a cooling.
There’s more yellow—
the tassels on top of the corn,
the wild sunflowers beside the road,
her yellow sundress…
the gold worth waiting for.
If I don’t write this,
no one else will see it.
Part this, part that,
the in-between.
It won’t ever be like this again.
Not this way.
We finally cut out the sick part of the elm.
Half of it’s gone now.
The wind blows right through it.
I watch, knowing exactly.
