When they meet me in my dreams, I do
what they say. We are encircled now, all
living together, my grandmothers and me.
Down dim paneled hallways I follow obediently
behind them. I answer their telephones in knotty
pine nooks. Those black eyes know
me. I hear their boarders walking over
our heads and I’m sent up the mahogany stair
case to collect the rent. I stand at the oak
door and knock. We are willow and birch,
enchanted and renewed; apple and blackthorn
blossoms with sharp spines. We are older
than the bristle cone pine in the desert. We are
the crone living in the elderberry shrub, straggly
and unruly in old age. We can grow anywhere,
conjuring, avenging, punishing.
We are the yew, adored above all others, screening
the doorway between this life and the next.