"I still had two friends, but they were trees."

March now. I’ve been away for a while, coming back to what looks like (at first) disappointingly little change at Schenley Plaza. Still the sound of dripping water, still the thin layer of snow, still the breath between my face and my notebook, still the park workers clearing ice from sensitive places, still clips from passing one-way cell phone conversations (“I feel bad, you know, we broke windows and stole stuff from their yard, you name it, everything but hard drugs, we did it, skipped school the next day…”), still my hand going numb before the first page is half-full, still the self-consciousness of being the weirdo who writes outside here in 16-degree weather, still wearing one glove (on my right hand, so thick it distorts my handwriting) because he lost the other one in December and hasn’t gotten around to buying a new pair yet and figures we’re so close to spring that it’s probably not worth it and that the money could be better spent elsewhere.

(Forgive him, he just read the Jamaica Kincaid essay, and is feeling parenthesis-prone.)

No birds today. Just the distant passing of trucks and buses.

Some changes, however few:

Our snowman is no more. Reduced to a white divot. Reduced to somehow more than gone. To say that he never existed (or that he was erased) would be an understatement—by the looks of it, our snowman in fact lived some kind anti-existence. Like when you erase a word so thoroughly that you tear the paper, leaving a hole instead of blank space.

The rebel footprints on the lawn, which must have thinned the snow, are now patches of green grass side-by-side. As if Spring herself walked through here (but kept going).

Workers clear ice not only from the pavilion, but from gardens and plane tree braches as well. They use scythes mounted on long yellow poles, scraping the freeze until it breaks so the trees won’t suffocate when they come back to life. I asked one of them (the workers, that is).

Which reminds me of a poem by Larry Levis I heard at AWP, the poem that’s been stuck my head ever since (in the spot where there’s usually a song). All I could see was this plaza, as if it’s become the Default Background of my mind just as it’s the background of this journal and this blog (and it occurs to me now that I’m about to fill the last page of said journal, the one I started right here in this park seven years ago).

I, too, read late at the library (back then) and looked out black windows onto (this) black lawn.

I, too, felt (and still feel) brother limitation and his clinging.

I, too, have walked home on dark winter nights thinking of acquaintances.

Most of all, I, too, have sat amidst the joggers trying to find this place and make it my own.

(I hope you enjoy it like I did.)

***

The Two Trees

by Larry Levis

My name in Latin is light to carry & victorious.
I'd read late in the library, then
Walk out past the stacks, rows, aisles

Of books, where the memoirs of battles slowly gave way
To case histories of molestation & abuse.

The black windows looked out onto the black lawn.

                                  ~

Friends, in the middle of this life, I was embraced
By failure. It clung to me & did not let go.
When I ran, brother limitation raced.

Beside me like a shadow. Have you never
Felt like this, everyone you know,

Turning, the more they talked, into . . .

Acquaintances? So many strong opinions!

And when I tried to speak—
Someone always interrupting. My head ached.
And I would walk home in the blackness of winter.

I still had two friends, but they were trees.
One was a box elder, the other a horse chestnut.

I used to stop on my way home & talk to each

Of them. The three of us lived in Utah then, though
We never learned why, me, acer negundo, & the other
One, whose name I can never remember.

"Everything I have done has come to nothing.
It is not even worth mocking," I would tell them
And then I would look up into their limbs & see
How they were covered in ice. "You do not even
Have a car anymore," one of them would answer.

All their limbs glistening above me,
No light was as cold or clear.

I got over it, but I was never the same,

Hearing the snow change to rain & the wind swirl,
And the gull's cry, that it could not fly out of.

In time, in a few months, I could walk beneath
Both trees without bothering to look up
Anymore, neither at the one

Whose leaves & trunk were being slowly colonized by
Birds again, nor at the other, sleepier, more slender

One, that seemed frail, but was really

Oblivious to everything. Simply oblivious to it,
With the pale leaves climbing one side of it,
An obscure sheen in them,

And the other side, for some reason, black bare,
The same, almost irresistible, carved indifference

In the shape of its limbs

As if someone's cries for help
Had been muffled by them once, concealed there,

Her white flesh just underneath the slowly peeling bark

—while the joggers swerved around me & I stared—

Still tempting me to step in, find her,

                        

                          And possess her completely.