Dogwood

Solstice brings dogwood, the yellow-tinged white-

blooming trees my mother wheelbarrowed home

to plant in our front yard puddle. Downpours

sent us splashing, sprawling in mud & grass

beneath the swollen buds, the dished blossoms,

veined leaves, fragile dinner-plate branches

we were not to climb. The smaller of Uncle Tommy’s

dogwoods flowered at his mother’s front door

flanked by lilacs, the larger over the laundry line.

Here one must rise from my bog to remind me

of West Medway, of Atlanta, of beauty in trees.

Palaver

by C. S. Giscombe

Neighborhood? Proximities change on you sooner or later. There’s a level of artfulness; my luck has changed more than one time. Love could be an embankment, even an esker, or Customs; or a sailing ship, noisy at the horizon. The idea was that the wind could carry your voice from here to there, from one side of the field to the other. I was always leaving a place at the point where I’d begun to care for it. These was the gain of singing; the devil’s hungry (in a song), the devil is sweet. How do I look? Neighborhood’s a little fishtail in the substances.