O . . . great-rooted blossomer
are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
— W.B. Yeats
“I hate this tree”—the first words from my new neighbor
bending over the ground cover beneath her magnolia,
Belle of the Old South, “sweet and fresh,”
subtropical exile to our fertile desert.
She was 80 or 85, the tree half her age
and tall as a three-story house,
still dropping leaves and seed pods
like a teenager with a bad case of dandruff.
“It killed my lawn,” she said,
a violation twenty years in the past, which she held onto
as if it were last year, or last week. It soothed
and fueled her anger, I imagined, to pluck the brown
papery leaves from their hiding place in ivy
and stuff them in a green bin. I wondered if Sisyphus
hated his rock as much as she hated that tree.
I knew how much I hated my job, eight or nine
hours every day trying to lift the world another inch.
And every night more leaves would fall, leaves
and pods, those sexual hand grenades, those
pregnant cluster bombs. And yet she could no more live
without the tree than she could without her anger.
They were like an old couple, so deformed
by their love that they couldn’t want anything else.
Every day after work I’d come home and find her,
bowed or kneeling, or toward the end just sitting in the ivy—
city of beetles, city of mice—and see the tree,
blazoned with sunset’s gilt, its orange
and ruby ornaments a flaming candelabra.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Rossi’s poems have appeared in The Southwest Review, The Sun, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore and many other journals. His reviews and interviews have appeared widely. He is a contributing editor at Poetry Flash and Pedestal. He lives in Northern California.