Jill Alexander Essbaum

Yes, Baum

Oui, Tree.
I’m speaking

to yew. It’s noon
and the mood

in which I’m currently
planted is as usual to me

as the spruce groves
in Norway—sloe

going, sloe gone. If yours
were the laurels

I’d longed for, I lost.
But ash to ash, as is

said. There is
no missed

tree here. In your
orchard I grew elder.

But the age
of us never became

me. Like an ersatz
ficus in a snazzed-up

parlor, I was out of your order,
your ardor, your arbor.

Hello,
Tallow.

It’s juniper. It’s June.
I lumber through

the clumsiest
of fuck yous. It isn’t

a clear cut
retort.

Mullberry,
I’ve mulled

You over. Never con
a conifer.

Nothing lucky in our clovers.
True, we sat by the sea as lovers

but not all beeches
bend. We leave them,

right? Tamarak, oak,
take back your oaths.

let’s settle it
with this cede-her sacrament:

Neither for worse,
nor best, nor work,

nor forest, nor thicket,
nor thick of it.

Not for the aspen.
Not for the asp.

Neither the hemlock’s
lockbox. Nor the pinebox

I’ll bury my pining in,
once it dies.
Nor the bitter,
quinine orders

you barked.
Nor the cork

that held my heart’s
hole closed when

even under pressure
of my palms

I couldn’t stop the run
of resin

and I stayed trapped
for years in the lacquer

and the lack.
When is a walnut

a door? When the sign reads
entry.

Or, when there is
no exit.

I don’t give
a fig

about your apples, Adam.
In Eden you gave me your name.

Linden? No.
It is no loan.

I earned it. I’ll keep it.
I should.

Even if it burns
like poisonwood.

 

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of several collections of poetry including Heaven, Harlot, and the single-poem chapbook, The Devastation as well as the New York Times best-selling novel, Hausfrau. She is a core faculty member of the University of California, Riverside, Low Residency MFA program.

 
Previous
Previous

Rachel Galvin

Next
Next

Omotara James