Rebecca Avenue has lost its trees:
the willow that would brush against my window,
and the spruce that cooled our porch out back,
the ginkgo I would rake in mid-October,
with its matted leaves like Oriental fans.
Even the beech has been cut down,
that iron pillar of my mother’s garden,
with its trunk so smooth against one’s cheek.
The dirt I dug in has been spread
with blacktop: tar and oil. They’ve rolled it
blithely over sidewalk slate
where cracks once splintered into island tufts.
Even leafy hills beyond the town
have been developed, as they like to say:
those tinsel woods where I would rinse myself
in drizzle, in the pin-wheel fall.
You can stand all day here without knowing
that it once knew trees: green over green
but gamely turning violet at dusk,
then black to blue-vermillion in the dawn.
It’s sentimental, but I miss those trees.
I’d like to slip back through the decades
into deep, lush days and lose myself again
in leaves like hands, wet thrash of leaves.