Blog #8: The tree across from my stoop

Outside the front door of my apartment building, one that creaks as it shuts and bands loudly against its frame, there is a concrete stoop that I have spent a great deal of time on since moving into my apartment this past August.  It's a small square of concrete, maybe 6x6 feet, with two steps leading down to walkway that then leads the sidewalk.  A small lawn of grass frames the walkway on either side, and two large bushes, dead now in the cold air, browned and brittle, but soon to be greening and budding in the new season, frame the stairs. At the end of Summer and into Autumn, I sat on the right side of the stoop in the balmy night air, watching the people pass, doing a great deal of poetry writing. Something about these concrete stairs, this little patch of grass beneath them that I could rest my bare feet on, the street ahead, lamp posts and headlights, sounds of grocery carts from the Market District next door, welcomed me and stimulated my creative mind.  As Winter came and brought colder nights, I've still spent time on the stoop but in shorter spans of time and less opportunity to ponder.

Still, when I walk in or out of that door at night, there is something that I always look at for a few seconds, or longer if I sit.  Across the street from my stoop, growing up just beside a tall lamp post and right out of the concrete, is my tree.  Something about this particular tree has always called my attention and my focus.  Its trunk leans slightly to the right, seemingly imbalanced, but its strong roots push into the ground and hold it steady.  Beneath the lamp light, the leaves in the fall made shades of color that I found it difficult to describe in my poems and even more difficult to turn away from.  The leaves were greens and yellows, little tapered diamond points at one end and curved half circles on the other.  I can see them vividly, their particular hue, their clustered groups on the ends of branches.  When Winter came, the bones of its branches rose gracefully out of its base and seemed to wind around the light, seemed to catch glints of silver moon and yellow street light in its fingers and hold them still for me.

I'll included a poem that's come out of my muse, to give an idea of the captivating nature it has on me, on this constant pull I feel it wrapping me with. Some of it ended up leaking into a couple other poems so it's split off to become pieces of others, but it originated from this tree. I could see it being the inspiration for a woman character in a story, but in a way I think I connect with it too deeply to make it anyone other than myself. With this idea, I changed the subject of the poem from 'the oak' (I'm not even positive it's an oak, I should find this out) to her, to see what it would do if posed as a woman.

She makes her own silhouettes

of rash and many branches,

                        stable and frenzied.

She grows her leaves of

            coppered green metal

            like mold on yellowed bread crust

                        while tendrils and filament spider inside. 

 She loves them hard,   

only to let them go  

when they’ve paled their color.

She reaches her fingers through the silvered smog

grasps at the moonlight 

pulls it into her like a breath.

She rebels against the air,

seizes a new space to stab with branches,

             shudders into a gasp of buds and knobs,

                        breathless, bare.

Textured veins creep up her side

            where the trunk split out of the ground

her legs splayed in rooted grace,

where she leans against her weight

           

            a coat of knuckled surface around her rawness

                                    so stacatto, so gristled

is the bark.