Adansonia digitata (Baobab)
Weightless as the heart that shelving dried
to a fraction, your fruit’s chalky remains
are fanned with copper threads, frayed veins
desiccated as those pondered
through decades of Elephant Hall glass to a glazed
tissue of dust. Digitata, for the hand; digitigrade,
for the single foot even the largest must lift
on tiptoe. Such delicate scale; such slight
progress—seeds witched away
from fat green teardrops fallen
to your kettled roots, here
knobby as new potatoes, there ropy
as lava folds, twisted gray laundry. Windfall of air
upon air, fruit colored to clotted cream;
each rind’s shattered cheek a velvet
olive or army, depending
the hour, the angle of shadow. Spring
you were all ruffled full moons which night-blooming
fruit bats settled, tugging close
the umbrella-ribbed rags of their wings
like jacketed old men; by morning your spent flowers
corpse-rank as summer, witness to the hook
of each snapped stem, the spindle of your every
bat-born branch. Hollow as a house, the heart
unblooded as the riveted rivulets of sand
ants trail your trunk to: spit-glued
petroglyphs of passage negotiating the stars
of lichen half the pale splatter
of weaver-bird droppings, half a whorled
ladder of fingerprints. Squat thumb horizon
makes of you, even beneath
what sad shade inversion gives: upside-down tree; thrown-
out-of-Paradise tree, your storied roots
such thin shelter.
SANDRA MEEK is the author of six books of poems, most recently Still (Persea Books, 2020). Read More.
"Baobab" first appeared in An Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea Books, 2016).