Hidden, Buried, Forgotten

Hidden, Buried, Forgotten

There’s no mistake, we have our stretching
conversation. He’s been alive
before my name was bound but he’s
fully new to me, calling
to me when I daydreamed past him
on a sultry afternoon.
This time I stopped and leaned against
him to loosen my boot and spill a

pebble into the grass, and
I thought I felt him shift beneath
the puny press of my hand.
I noticed how a board was fastened
to him with large nails, making
him a part of the cattle
fence beside his trunk. The green-stain
of moss was daubed along the bark,

a raw patina of time and what he’d
seen on many vanished days.
The goldfinch were piping across the skin
of the sky, north to down,
and I craned my neck until
my eyes ached, and I looked
up along his giant’s thigh,
and I hissed out my question,

and he answered in that same
minute. He answered more than I
asked. I can hear you,
he said, and I can see it
all. I have no vulnerable eyes,
but my skin watches to the
horizons all round, and nothing
trots beneath my arms that I

do not note, catalog, react to,
evaluate, flinch from, frown upon, sigh through,
watch over, sing to, or love.
Even the steel-nosed weevils, even the
snacking termites reap my love.
And I have seen you and that dog
stumble past me, you with your eyes
and him with his questing snout, and I have

loved you as you have counted me a
background prop, an unseen accessory
to your reverie at taps, and at
reveille. I fell from somewhere, somewhere
around here, and landed where I
fell, diving into the dirt,
trod down, hidden, buried, forgotten.
Men beat nails into me,

but they nail each other too,
which is worse, because they think
about it when they do it to
each other and they smile. The smiles
of men are terrible and final, and
they should be rare, or nonexistent,
but they are neither, and they remain,
as I remain. Nothing is lost,

but it can never again be
what it was. You can only
find the crumbled leaves, the brown
and brittle needles, the empty acorn
caps, the shreds of crumbling bark,
and pick over them, and cry out
because they were once you, once
you. I called my dog to me

just then, before the locust’s voice
had faded, and I stroked fur
while touching bark, and I took
my own silence into myself,
girded to be as still and as wordless
as the tree, as accurate a witness,
as deft an accuser, as steady a bolt-
drawer, forever and always while

I have my limbs. I withdrew,
calling the dog with me, and
a curtain of dust drew down
between him and me, and summer
breathed along towards its death
and me towards mine, and clocks will chute
us towards each other once again,
his leaves above, my feet below.

~ S.K. Orr