The Burial Ground, After the Battle

The youngest ones were playing baseball at the funeral.
When I found the ball orphaned in snow
a few days after the deaths,
I imagined it arcing above the mourners as they bled
and the sermonizing saw bit through
the splinters of grief,
tallying rings of deeds as it cut:
the sprawling early years, the wood intoxicated
by water, sky, and moss;
the clenched fists of later years, just under the bark,
graven in waning handwriting on the sunset-colored cambium.
The stumps lean into the blasted hillside,
witnesses and murdered at once.

Wearers of jubilant muscle
tossed a baseball through the amputated forest.
The sky shrilled its blue, unheeded,
and now the winter rains unbandage the snow
and reveal the sutured land, where renegade water abducts earth
and the sweet piercing cry of tree blood
calls to circling hawks,
uplifted sabers of ferns,
world-cradling dew droplets,
and salmon battering themselves against rigid streams.

The dead are lined up according to size and type,
as neatly arranged as clothing in a drawer,
records on a shelf,
bullets in a chamber.
A quiescent machine waits to lift them,
its steel mouth clamping one, nipping at mossy skin
and flaccid lichens.
Rain reads the entrails of the grove: orange, red, gold,
reeking of stranded sap, patient history, summers stored in a library of sugars.
The future floats to the surface, clotted by
chance encounters with dark, handsome
grocery bags
and toilet paper.

In town, flags bowed in honor of forgetful presidents
and the raptors of war.
On the threadbare mountain, a baseball smacks into a calloused palm
while heartwood grieves and rivers fail to intervene.
A poem I met as a child
humbled itself at the altar of tree
and celebrated the anthology of forests.
When I listened to the heavy equipment wail that autumn morning,
more than a thousand poems died
for the sake of the smart shopper and the inky blare of news.
Yet a few months before, at the site of another forest’s interment,
someone had lain a fan of dahlias
at the knees of the clustered logs,
orange, red, and gold petals gasping
like fish panting on banks,
fire in their mouths,
ashes in their gills.