I wanted you to grow up in a house
of our own, like the one I had
with the backyard, and the sandbox,
the backyard swing, the slide, the trees,
their strong roots and towering limbs,
the bikes on the quiet street,
and the softball games we played in the street,
dodging the odd car passing the house,
climbing and dropping from the limbs
of trees. But instead of that we had
apartments, many of them, small trees
no good for climbing, the sandbox
in the park, or no sandbox,
mostly a busy city street
so I taught you about cars before trees.
If my foundation was that house
in Yakima, then what did you have?
My troubled limbs
turn in sleep. My restless limbs
reach out for something, a puzzle box
that opens up in secret spaces, or dreams I had
of driving street to street
discovering I’d forgotten you; a house
where I kept finding extra rooms. Trees
were nowhere in those dreams. Trees
lurked on the outside of those dreams, their limbs
tapped on the walls of the house.
I kept a cup of sand in a box
I walked down a street
that led nowhere. We had
no compass. We had
no pole fashioned from a sacred gum tree
to mark the center of our universe. We wandered street
to street out past the four directions. Silence fills our limbs,
grows inside us like a garden in a window box
on the south side of an apartment house.
A coin found in the street, a playing card we had
lost in an old house, those orphan trees
we wrap our limbs around empty space in a box.
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