The day our acacia fell
in a freak windstorm,
I was in the other room, looking
the other way,
watching the window as rain
fell frontally,
thinking how odd that was, drops
like blown stars,
spreading across the glass.
Then the strange swishing sound
of larger limbs flagellating
the smaller limbs,
wind debriding the branches,
wind bullying our tree
to the ground.
Why wasn’t I there to witness it,
the way the trunk
must have fallen into mud and mulch
and leaf litter?
Limbs shucked from the trunk
and scattered, its fall as unheard
as the proverbial tree
falling in the forest or Auden’s Icarus
slipping unnoticed into the sea.
Gone, all traces of the squirrels
who hung their dreys
like slung basketry in its branches
and the harsh babble of jays
chasing and cursing
somewhere in the arterial crown
that bodied the air,
gave it place and bird-voice.
Those limbs, like aerial roots
spreading into the blue
transparency of sky,
a void now,
as the sea must have been
that fatal day.
I think Auden was telling us
that one person, at least
one person should have witnessed
that upside-down boy fall.
The waxen stumps of melted wings
still stuck to his shoulders,
the white V-shaped legs
like twigs
that for a spilt second
parted the waves.
—
Jeanne Wagner is the author of The Zen Piano-mover, winner of the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and Everything Turns Into Something Else, runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. Her manuscript, One Needful Song is the recent winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize and will come out in November 2024. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and The Southern Review.
