The Oak Tree (July 2018)

Two years are etched on arrows

pointing to rings in the cross-section

of a 100-year-old oak. An arrow bearing

the year 2011 gestures towards the bark

at the trunk’s edge where the year

2000 is nailed about two inches away.

The years don’t proceed evenly

down to a center, as one might think

they would. Rather, the rings distort

as they circle the trunk, evening

as they near the bark and take on

the tree’s outer shape. Dark patches,

black welters mark the marrow

of the wood, where sap still bleeds

from cracks six years after it was felled.

Judging by how much space is left

between the years and the center

where the rings are so dense I can

no longer discern one from the other

it seems inescapable, that I imagine

the wood as a kind of map of time

contracting towards its center

as bathwater rounds a drain.

I scratch at a spot roughly where

I was born, then trace further inward

the births of my mother, my father.

There aren’t enough rings to hold

the births of their own parents

but that are compacted in the dark

of the heartwood, smooth and hard

as stone. It’s unclear why the oak was

cut down — whether it was diseased

or too old, or even if it could still be

standing, growing with our lives below

the bark. Or am I only able to know

myself apart — the tree as being

there, its rotting cross-section

propped-up in front of me

that I might see when

we were once alive.