by Katie Hartsock
Sunrise light that lets the river melt and keep
its freezing, too, I’ve climbed this hill
for you. A squirrel scrabbles to the top
of a thin tree’s leaning, then dives down in.
I’d love to disappear into a tree; maybe
language is the home we head for, a hole
no one knows is there until they step inside
and start to look around. Once, by the corner
of Liberty and Fourth, I was carrying
an exercise ball to the Y to have them reinflate it.
Those were the early days of decades
of my owning but not using exercise balls—
this one had sat all summer in a hot closet
underneath a stack of essays whose ink
stuck to its surface, candle-waxy backwards
lines of letters. My neighbor, a girl about 8,
stopped me; asked what it was, what the words
meant. I explained and said You can’t really
read it. And she said If you were inside
the ball, you could read it. All morning a morning
of brightest horizontal beams, the kind that cliffs
can swallow whole, but now it’s snowing.
And I’m inside, and open to, what closes in.
Listen to the poem here:
the language of trees. (LeFurge Woods). Photo credit: C. Finch
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Katie Hartsock‘s second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse, 2023) won the Philip McMath Prize. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University.
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This is an original poem, brought to you by Poet Tree Town, a Washtenaw-based poetry-in-public initiative and celebration of local poets. Find out more about Poet Tree Town on Instagram and Facebook, or say hello at [email protected].
