Thicket
The oldest palm trees in our county
I like to think of as old men with beards.
Or older, great-grandfathers with beards.
Long beards that have been growing
for centuries and cascade now over their feet.
Or, old women with beards, crones with lion
manes sweeping the ground, straw spun
to gold when sun momentarily ignites
the fronds. To step on one—even the deadest
feels alive, I have to apologize.
Or, like ancient prophets wild and abandoned
muttering mu mu as they let out those cries
that come thick with trance, otherworldly.
I would have to be far far from everyone
to let out such unearthly cries. But it’s time
to see them as trees, it is only right—
with fronds or without, with crowns
blown off in hurricanes, trees
guillotined or shotgunned, even if
what stands guard is just a trunk with holes
drilled by woodpeckers or cross hatchings
where the day to day has eaten in. Along
a canal bank, exposed and dangling
a clutch of roots, the rest sheered
off by farm machinery, but still
recognizably tree. Who knows what is
under all those beards and manes, those
waterfalls the palms push out of themselves.
What newspapers, plastic bags, tubing
sheets, syringes, masks, needles.
Far in, farther than the arm can reach
and secretive as someone who has pulled
a mantle of silence over their face,
beseeching privacy, recesses within.
Still visible, but inaccessible….
After the doctor signed the necessary,
I wanted us to be hidden under the fronds
of those trees—no further in, under
their bark, so I pulled your hands
with their bumps and knobs to my face,
and rested in them, I let my hair drape
over us, heaved your arms with their burls
and bony knots, around my neck
to make a thicket of us. A thicket so dense
no cry could ever escape.
Susan Mitchell has authored three books of poems, and been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Read more.