I am learning

by SUZANNE SWANSON

it all goes away. Even before death or the demented mind. I am learning which trees are likely to falter, that the dogwood goes down and extends its territory at the very same time. I pretend to learn which are the weeds, which the desirables, but I can’t really tell. I just never can tell. I am learning hollow. I am learning howl. I am learning the stumbling over words. I am learning the stumble of one foot over the other. But, what’s new? I have never learned steady. Some days I can feel every molecule doing its choreography. Every other molecule pitching a different dance. Synergy they say, but when does the exponential happen, the two become more than two? Today I am taking pictures of our friend, the maple on the boulevard. Today it turns from tree to wood, shade becomes sky. Some god’s hand bolted lightning to its trunk a while back, and the tree did what it could to follow my family motto—head down, keep on—but weakness prevailed, and a branch once benign now threatens to fall right on the people who pass by—the neighbor with a lost world who picks up sticks, the women who pause for my columbine and wild ginger, all the kids scootering around the block. I am learning that love is not too strong a word for how I feel about this Empress Maple. Still, it’s true I am thinking already about whether the peonies could be happier now, no longer having to stretch for sun, standing up straight under an empty patch of blue.