Elegy for a Buckeye
I went all the way back to the beginning looking for a giant
On a quiet street in Ohio but it was gone and so were the spiny,
Gold brown husks containing the glossy nuts with circular eyes.
On the way home from school, I would listen to husks cracking,
The buckeyes falling for squirrels to lug off in their gaped mouths.
Food for winter? Isn’t that the first and last theme? If I had one
Right now, I could look into its varnished mahogany burl
And see my father thumbing a buckeye like a miniature football.
My Blue Angel cousin who crashed his jet must have held
A buckeye in his hands and used it, like me, to steer by
When earthbound, everyone in Ohio now distant from the trees
They planted to define them. Even the coalman conductor
on a tight scream
Clock who I waved to from my bike might have glimpsed
This beauty before he entered the steels mills in Chicago,
And thought for a moment he might lean against such a tree
And read a book. My memory of all this only as old as September
And young when compared to the Shawnee who named the tree
After its nut flicking a swale like a buck’s eye. They are gone
Along with the Delaware and Miami and every other tribe
That ever lived in Ohio where this tree once lived and laid out
A simple feast, or do I have it wrong and the eye of the tree
I climbed and loved still sees what is happening and holds on?
J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in over a hundred-fifty publications. Read more.
J.P. White’s “Elegy for a Buckeye” was previously published in Willow Springs.