The Trees Are Gone

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.