“Taking 500,000 Photographs of a Dogwood Tree”
The hospital bed is stuck in an uncomfortable position
where it leans down instead of up, wracking the lumbar,
spreading ribs flat, and coating the bark in pondscum.
Here lies pollen blown over the trailer, skimming water
like oil, clustered like a powdered lotus, sheer as cheddar
muslin. The wind tore the whole fucking tree up and out
of the dirt. I’m as mad as sumac on the skin; even the geese
keep away. I got thousands of bad angles loaded on my Gmail,
and dozens of polaroids littered at my feet like Mamaw’s
dementia. When the light combs through the pine straw
and catches all these cankers just right, I can hear the tree
wheeze like paper wind chimes. Here’s another: here’s me
laid out on these boughs sogged across the muddy banks.
Here’s Papaw strumming his guitar like he ain’t died. Here’s
the mailman come again. Here's me– Here’s the lake–
it’s muddy as hell, catfish water, the water that kills copperheads
with duck boots, and the sky’s never been more clear. A sky
like good meth, a sky like Papa’s up counting rice again,
so we all play vampires or IRS. Here’s all the painted turtles
scraping the wet branches trying to scramble up and catch
the sun in their turtle-shell, a stumbling chalice full of light
teetering on the great wooden snakes, dripping with moss
and dead rings. You gotta watch the collar rot, the eat up
and spit out of the Crown Canker, the bisecting girdle
that strips the skin: so many scars, it looks like a column
of pennies with the bank paper torn to let some slip out.
Ain’t no process to preserving a life stripped away.
Ain’t no point in counting the rings of a dying mother,
stooped over nothing, just a bad back, just a rod here,
five or six epidurals, the fear of burning nerves right out
of her spine. The dogwood blooms droop like sleeping
children over the water, and the twigs droop like it hurts
to carry them. The roots of the trunk spread out like Papa
when he walked too drunk. It’s branches as spindly and knobby
at his twiggy arms gorged on bursitis. Liver stuck out
like the front of an 85’ Silverado. Legs like Marlboro 100s
but this one woman– she takes photos at funerals and shows them
to the family, so there’s Papa all folded up like a paper plane
that didn’t fly far enough. Polaroids ain’t useful. This is no time
to be useful. This is time to sing badly in the woods and scare
deer. This time the tree dies. This time, when Sister Nunez lays
hands on Kimball’s skinless legs, he wakes up and screams.
Right now, this tree is in the cloud, and every roll in its belly,
every elbow on every arm lifts up these forests of fingers
peeling off like stolen cars. They call them leaves because
you haven’t left yet. When you do, you find them. My pictures
are stacking up like crackers on a cheese plate, something
for me to choke on later, after they’ve sat on the table a while.
Across the gravel is the sumac and the poison sumac and the
kudzu. Across the lake is pine trees. Across my heart, the pictures
are going into the computer, and I’m gonna compile them into one
tree froze in this desperate moment. Not twenty feet away,
unripe persimmons hang where I can reach them. A numb mouth
could do me some good. My dry tongue stuck to my dry cheek,
let’s peel off the dead skin and write prayers, because this is
the collar rot to hang in the Louvre, collar rot to be welded
together in front of Fernbank. This is the fall of a redacted summer,
where the leaves all come down at once and we’re left raking
it over. In my room, behind my ugly metal bookshelf Papa made
when he worked at Hon, is an old portrait of some white lady
I don’t know. I remember painting the laundry room, before
I lived here and there being candles all over the place.
The lake catches sunlight all weird. Its surface is like a tarp
shiny in the wrong places. This tree is a winch dragging
me up like a lakebed. The swamp downhill is a cistern
full of undrinkable water. In the hills is a water tower,
and I don’t know if its full or not. I can’t stand a dead
tree. Or a dead metaphor, like that one about holes
nailed into a door frame when you lie. All the Flemish
still lifes look like they were painted in my old barn.
The one they tore down after we lost the house.
Every dogwood tree I’ve hung around winds up sideways.
I hate how much people love the symmetry you find
in a lake shining some fallen thing back. Like a birdworn
branch is more beautiful when the cheapest sky there is
paints some shimmering shade of it. I want the whole thing
on camera. Now I’m taking video. No tripod but I combed
the grass apart so it can watch me dance like an Apostolic.
Gnats in my belly, I eat good. Petals of a dogwood bitter
in my mouth like strong tea. And the leaves, my goodness
the leaves. Far too early in summer for leaves this color.
James Rosser
James Rosser is a fry cook at cedartown Captain D's. They love to talk poetry and videogames, especially at the same time.
Twitter: JLR_III