Walt’s Maple

 I used to think of that tree as ours

One side turned to the road another towards

the screened in porch.

We’d marvel 

     Not knowing anything, except it’s curious 

Bloom, how the leaves took different shapes,

How half reached for the sky while the 

Other clung,

How outwards vibrant green turned to red

While the inward yellowed and browned, 

A divided tree, 

      We wondered aloud at its differences

   Wondered even if, it was a graft some part gifted to the whole, an addition, too special

But this year, I watched the tree alone, 

as the branches reaching toward our porch did not bud, 

Walt told me the roots -not pruned, had choked it dry, 

And I,

By myself, cleaned the porch in which you used to sit, 

   The living room in which we played,

The dining area in which we ate,

The bedroom where we once laid,

     And then set out, saying goodbye alone, to Walt’s maple, no longer yours and mine

 (well maybe still mine). 

New life

 G-d carved her knife along the lines of my feet, find myself walking down a new street, murals of divinity, geometric patterns, an icecream shop to be, and me with my dance moves, at the walk up coffee dispensary,  waiting impatiently for an Americano.

She with a blade so thin, I couldn’t feel it move within, and still sometimes wonder if my path was divided at all. Multiplied, and I am in a brand new St. Paul apartment staring at the lightning grasping across a breath of sky. Forking, a life untied, unmoored, set free, and somewhat ruefully seeking new security. 

And of the limitless paths unspooled, which will this thread bear? I ask for the highest and greatest- of that which is unfathomable, my pleasure a trifling annoyance as is the drip of chalk dust in my office -off hundred year old bricks which she is scraping, to me a nuisance, to them a returning, a riffing, a new way forward. 

Everything expanding, and all of us cloying to what we once knew, or believed we knew, or at least felt at one time determined to hold, and she with her sharp embrace, telling all of us no. Be!  she commands and scattering we flee, shards glorifying that infinite synonym of me. Each division compelling us forward, into what we can never be certain.