Starting Over #4

There's a tree in east Texas, on a campus
between the small stadium and the one road,
just beyond the parking lot laid empty, pine needles
gathered in piles while pollen blankets the asphalt.
The tree with thorns growing out of its back and out
its mouth, the tree with fruit that hangs like an orange
but burns the tongue.

I saw it one last time before I left that state
of heat, juniper, and limestone,
and I begged the tree to come, to grow where I grow,
to lock with dirt and pedal through the roadways
as I galloped beside, I begged the tree to be brave,
and it turned and twisted to give me
a branch, a polished green thorn
that would only die as it wrestled with the rivers
that no longer sped through its veins.

Walking, just recently, in a wood of fern and dead birch,
a wallop of cedars that are not Cedrus and all that salal,
I felt a raindrop pat-pat-pat until it splashed at my feet,
a distraction that lead to a mis-step, an embrace:
a tingle of nettle and a punch of salmonberry.
Tears tickled my eyes as I recalled the tree in Texas,
thorns enough to break skin but lonely enough to never have to.
I remembered wanting to be like that,
and watched a welt wash across my wrist from the nettle,
the sensation swelling like a great wave
and it hit me like water, like a cold punch in the morning,
that I was alive, that I was engulfed, that my thorns
were worn down because of what begged.