The Hanging Tree of Memory
A shotgun house on the bank
of a despoiled creek, gasoline
rainbow surface sprouting failed
washers, Buick fenders, a busted bike
among chunks of sledge-hammered concrete.
Someone’s home in ruins.
The shotgun house a shrine of gentle
music, played first with the right hand,
then the aching left. A demonstration
of resolve as well as technique. Knick-knacks:
saints and smiling dogs, ghostly shepherds,
Jesus in agony.
The woman of the house, small and old,
smelling of garlic and ten-thousand flowers,
loves only her upright built the previous
century. The man of the house, lonely,
performs tricks with a bullwhip in the yard:
twigs snapped from branches,
cattail fluff from stalks along the creek, the head
from a water snake. The old man foretells
the weather—rain coming—from the yellow-
green snake’s writhing in the dust. My sister,
gone pale as the dead, tiny hands shaking, fears
for the man’s soul.
Across the road, the Old Mill Tavern.
I watch the now vacant house
from the branches of a hanging tree
in the dirt parking lot, or so the old man
declared it: a cattle rustler left to dangle
among fluttering leaves.
My father and grandfather sit at the bar,
burial ground for those not yet dead
but rehearsing. The lithe right hand
in the house across the road, the buried
snake head, my sister, near tears, shuddering
with premonition.
The old woman’s tongue clicking the call note
of rebuke in lieu of a metronome. Her husband,
in stained seed-company cap and denim overalls,
between rumors of outlaws and wild horses, God’s
rejects, glances at the house. The woman. Her upright.
A dead man swinging from this branch where I sit.
.
This Moment Is All Time –
— Shinshu Roberts, Being Time
In the second it takes
to swallow your pride,
your belief you can live
forever, time’s arrow lodges
in your breastbone, behind
your right ear, in an organ
you really need if spring
is to be more than rumor.
Birds on the southern horizon.
The snowline in retreat.
You give up any pretense
the rules don’t apply. Gravity,
for example, that forces other
men to kneel. Entropy
that pulls a woman in two,
quick, as if late for an appointment.
You send a stranger roses,
tell the man behind the counter
his fortune—the queen of hearts,
the joker as in every life, an ace
of any tribe. You give someone hope.
Then you walk home the long way,
name every bird, count wingbeats
as some count coins, call the wind
your familiar to ward off spirits,
tremors of foreboding, the fear
that makes them equal.
You try to measure the distance
between this moment and the end,
surprised by how your every breath
holds all of time.
.
Michael McIrvin taught writing for several years and now writes fulltime from the high plains of Wyoming. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Optimism Blues: Poems Selected and New (2003, 2019) and Hearing Voices (Fearful Symmetry, 2020). His most recent novel is The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time (2009, 2019) and he is currently writing a novel about a semi-feral boy. A list of his books is here: https://amzn.to/2VHHBuP
Stone Poetry Quarterly 