A Tree’s Shade Speaksof Its Shadow
- A Tree’s Shade Speaksof Its Shadow
A shade looks into its shadow,as you do into a mirror,and longs to immerse itselfin it, as you would in a lake.
And as you flatter yourselfthat that snapshot of you is a poorlikeness, a shade dislikeshaving its shadow taken
for itself — voluminous, unseeable,damp and cool, hospitableto lawn chairs and sword ferns,incised sharply in the air
like a deep jigsaw puzzle piece,vaulted, swaying in the heat,growing penumbral as it goesdown to take shape as its shadow.
On shady days the shadowsare nowhere to be seenor everywhere. Then the suncomes back and redefines
all the shadows, all but thoseof the blighted and beetled, whose shadeshover for a spell above their names:American chestnut, ash. [End Page 28]
John Shoptaw is the author of a book of poems on the Mississippi River watershed, Times Beach, winner of the 2015 Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. He teaches poetry in the English Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He is at work on a book of poems, Near Earth Object.
