SAINT FRANCIS AND THE PINE TREE

Before they beat me I knelt down

beneath the pine tree

and lowered

my head and placed my hands

in front of me like two plates,

together but lightly

so they wouldn’t break, just like this,

like how a child’s psychologist would do

with two dolls, one female

and one male, and ask

was it like this? My hands barely touching

so that you could draw a piece of floss

between them, and inside

the ten-year-old cave

I had made of myself, I thought

of Saint Francis and how he forgave

everyone and was poor

like me though he could have been rich,

and how he was always standing

beneath a tree or standing

with an animal that lived in trees,

and how he was kept alive by love,

and that was what I was going to do,

I knelt there

and smelled the pine

and said aloud

some made-up prayer

about forgiveness and that’s

when the front of a skateboard

slammed into my face, into it

but also sort of through

my face, like a breeze

made out of wood and metal.

I looked up. I looked up into

the arms and stiff green needles

of the pine tree

and it seemed like a father

looking down on me the way fathers do

though the arms moved like a mother,

and I wasn’t alone,

I had the boys who were beating me

for one, and the pine for the other.

After that I felt like every tree

knew who I was.

That I loved love, though

I had no real idea about it

or what to do. I mean

really what to do.

And then one of the boys held my arms

while another boy held my legs

while another boy pulled down my pants

while another boy grabbed a branch,

grabbed a part

of the pine tree that had fallen,

and waved it in front of my face and said

we’re gonna stick it in you, we’re gonna stick it

up your ass, but was a coward, or he was

also afraid and so just hit me with it

and laughed and then some wind came

because it doesn’t care about shame or kids

and rose up beneath the pine

and with it some of the boys’ brown hair

and the pine tree moved,

and the boys looked off at something else and then

followed after it, whatever unlucky thing

it was, and I sat there alone again

but for the pine and the light in the tree and the wind

and I thought of Saint Francis

and how he might stand up now and hug the tree

and call him brother for had not the tree

stood there and witnessed him, his body,

and so I stood up

in my rugged robe of blue jeans and T-shirt,

and hugged the tree, and kissed it, and thanked it

for not leaving me, and called it brother,

and then never came near it again,

for the following summer I felt God walk away

and chose my cock over sainthood,

and stood beneath a weeping willow and kissed

Angela Marquez and took her tongue

into my mouth and she took my fingers

into her body

and the willow moved above

and all around us,

it held us and kept us

until we were

done with one another

and then it let us go.