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The Ladder Tree

The Ladder Tree The landscape turned against us. Earth became grass. The river went to rocks then returned as a thousand small frogs.The road was swept under weeds, remembered first by animals.What love sent us into the trees? The six young sycamores, we wove into a nest. Others, the locals dubbed circus trees, heart-shaped, hollowbellied .You carried always a knife. I, the strings for lashing. California. The bean and alfalfa fields.What held us? How swiftly the saplings gave, or how long they bowed before breaking? Supple bark.Ash is softest, birch prone to bruising. Loquat, apple.The lissome aspen, bound to the body of an elder—only in this way would the flesh accept another. Our proof: a roadside attraction.An architect for years crawled under wire to water what the field forgot. And we forgot. -58- Asphalt claimed the trees. Some were split open, their insides tiny wires, fibrous, still a mystery how we got them to live. Remember, at the hill’s crown, the Ladder Tree, mute, rising to air? Its nine rungs, pruned from a pair of box elders, ending into nothing, only sky.The other trees, the ones we reached, the ones we wanted to study or sap, were simply cut, felled by storms, disease, insects so small as to slip beneath bark and eat from the inside. Love, stay long enough. Something will change. -59- ...