TWO POEMS by Anne Barngrover
ELEGY FOR FALLEN PALMS
–after Hurricane Irma
I learn the facts about what we’ve lost:
palm trees don’t form annual rings.
You’d find their age in the Bible or Quran, old as Oil
Palm, Fan Palm, or Windmill Palm:
I learn these descendants of a common line.
Assyrians believed the sign of eternal life
was a palm beside a stream, but what if the men
who poison rivers are always the last to drink?
Yellowed fronds mean too much rain.
It’s hard to start over after a great change,
but if they’re not cut for tables or sold as seeds,
palms can outlive a home. And I’m so tired
of Midwesterners in boat shoes
who tweet, Why would anyone live there?
from their Puritanical woods that expire
in annual gray. Because people who reside
in paradise deserve to suffer sometimes—
oh, but they’ll vacation here! It’s unnatural for you to live
where you’re supposed to unwind. Queen Palm,
Wild Date Palm, Sugar Palm or Wine:
I learn the five hands of palmistry.
My hand is a Wood Hand, its knuckles thick
and fingers long, my mind stubborn and heart
often wrong. What scares me most is the idea
of deep time, or everwhen—which is a breath
away from evergreen—though not at all the same.
The Earth remembers our sins, for time is not
a tree trunk pushing forward but the wheel
within that churns and scars,
like how when I was thirteen the junior high
librarian stopped me in the hallway and insisted,
But your family was in the basement once the tornado hit
your house, and I had to shake my head, no.
How teens drove to my neighborhood, parked
next to the Red Cross. They wanted to see roots
gutted from soil, brick chimney that smashed a car.
They brought popcorn for themselves.
And I’m not easy to move to tears, but still I cried
for the maples and oaks that fell in my backyard.
What I mean is, trees take the wind
to spare the walls. Bottle Palm, Spindle Palm—
in a garden on Mauritius there grows
the Loneliest Palm, single specimen
of a single species, most solitary of any kingdom.
It’s enclosed in a box of metal wire,
a dot on a dot on a map of the world that’s strewn
with broken palms. I learn flowers once glowed
on this last palm in the colors of white
and cream. Humans tried to intervene.
It hasn’t bloomed in years.
I ALWAYS WANTED TO SAVE THE RAINFOREST
but now I live in a rainforest
and the thing I can’t save
is me. Let’s get to that later on.
A rainforest should be studied
in fours: emergent layer, canopy,
understory, forest floor. Self-watering.
Oldest ecosystem. My doctor explains
that the brain speaks to gland hormones
which speak to the ovaries
which speak to the uterus—or something
along those lines. I try to write
it down as fast as my hand can move.
An osprey flies above me with a fish
caught in its talons. The fish still looks
me in the eye. What is it they say
about a bird of prey overhead?
I’m afraid to Google my fortune.
I know I sound paranoid, but the rainforest
is a cutthroat environment.
One must innovate
in order to survive. They tell me
nine vials of blood is less
than it seems, but if my bad
numbers are from stress, I plan
to sue Paul Ryan for damages.
Just don’t write about
climate change! The word
cervix is polarizing, and no one wants
to hear about your pelvic floor,
complex though it may be.
What is it they say about women
and our bodies? Sometimes we feel
an unconscious reflex to guard
ourselves against a world hell-
bent on taking everything away.
And sometimes when I sleep
I wake up to teeth
that no longer fit in my jaw
or hips that ache from aggressive
curling into a creature of the soil.
The forest floor is the most intricate
layer of the four. Light can’t reach
me forever. What is it they say
about sympathetic overload? I have
my students write a research paper
in which there’s a solution
for every problem. I ask them why
did I structure the assignment
this way, and they don’t know
enough about despair to answer.
I could list all those who poison
and seize, but the rainforest works
to rebalance the numbers. My God.
Do women and rainforests
have to do everything?
I don’t live in a real rainforest.
It’s just a forest that’s humid,
dark, and tropical, so dense
I could find my way inside
and you might never see me return.