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American Plane Tree

The sycamores are shedding again,
the lawn littered with their mottled bark:
mourning dove gray, butternut, ash.
This is their yearly strip to the bones,
the trunk cool and smooth to the touch.
But first, it’s scabrous, thin strips peeling
and hanging, like spent skin after a bad
sunburn. I want to scale the tree
like a lumberjack, rip off the rest. Which,
of course, I can’t; yet again a reminder
how flawed, this one life. A friend
I saw recently suddenly died. This country,
a runaway train. Foxes in the henhouses.
Weather askew: fires incinerate the west,
flash floods drown the east. The sycamore
doesn’t care. Each year, another ring.
An inch of girth. An applause of leaves.
And then the great
letting go.

Barbara Crooker is the author of nine books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series).  Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, The Poetry of Presence, and Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse.

Issue 15 >