John Palen
John Palen is the author of “Distant Music” and “Open Communion: New and Selected Poems”, both from Mayapple Press, and “Riding With the Diaspora,” which won the Sheila-Na-Gig chapbook competition in 2021. He lives, writes and gardens on the Illinois Grand Prairie.
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Trees
I used to walk all over town
with an app, collecting names of trees
like a birder working on a life list:
red oaks and white oaks, sycamore,
walnut, all the maples.
Now I like to watch the canopy,
the trees I know and the ones I don’t,
their constant, ceaseless change
sixty feet above my head.
I stop and look at ginkgos, though,
remembering the avenue in the quad,
male and female planted together.
I want to hang on somehow
to those lost trees — the pale woven bark,
the fan-shaped yellow leaves burning
that first October away from home,
the pheromones of smelly fruit
pressed out under our feet.
I stop and look at bald cypress. There’s a street
I walked for years and didn’t see them,
and then I did. When I got home I had to find you,
interrupt to tell you about them,
their feathery, deciduous needles
and tall, straight trunks, flared at the ground
like bell-bottom trousers in the ‘60s.
And it’s okay that the trees
live their aloof, noble lives outside language,
don’t care, don’t even not care
whether I’m nostalgic or garrulous
or know their names.
