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.