Frauen auf Baumen

There’s a lesson here I don’t see, in addition to the ones I realize
but don’t pursue, and those I glimpse yet hardly register. As in
 
the way a wind bends boughs of a white poplar, flipping leaves—
chalk-pale undersides, pileous twigs, silver bark: you’d think
 
 
snowfall.
       There are so few things to
reveal because most everything is so far down the well—
 
piled on top of each other,
like wet clothes
 
intertwined, thrown around in a washing machine;
some pieces aren’t recognizable
 
but you know them anyway—
my brother’s worn red flannel shirt he never took off,
 
my mother’s long white hair, always down when
my father’s fist hit the table,
 
bleached pine,
ghostly. Oil portraits—a pair—
 
from the South
hanging on by their
 
 
nails.
       Barbet—her angular nose like
mine but dark hair. You can’t help but
 
compare—all refractions, our scaffolding of
similes and metaphors. You fit in where you can, your half basement
 
becomes a slap or crawl space. Fissured trunks sucker
the roots of extensive clonal colonies. I
 
take heart from discarded
photos at flea markets of women in trees—
 
from the ‘20s to ‘50’s it was a German pastime:
men taking snapshots of girlfriends
 
laughing while lying in flowered
dresses and heels on a branch over a sun-struck river,
 
leaning back in an icy fork with a hot toddy.
Arboreal escape, a
 
 
vanishing.
But they
always had to come down—that’s the other
 
thing. Maybe no one now
knows who they were, but they are visible in the blank pages
 
I turn. And in the commanding
sideways-stare of Barbet Weil,
 
inhabiting her commissioned painting
with a half-smile, like an ancient sibyl—
 
gauntlet-cuffed black corset-laced dress—
an augury of ravens and crows, this emigrant from Baden
 
where white poplar isn’t popular. Eight children, four husbands,
two businesses plus running blockades
 
during the Civil War: Barbet was not
going to
 
 
disappear.
What would she make of me: putting an
end
 
to her: that’s how it feels, but her DNA
must spiral
 
in some of the 1,061 relatives
my genetic testing discovered. Snowdrops

bloom, white-out the landscape,
then disappear:
 
they vanish twice. In looking at endings,
aren’t I living within an imaginary world—magical
 
my friend says to me—constructed
of recovered ceiling beams,
 
repaired tapestries, trompe l’oeil doors:
well, I must like this—
 
 
cupping
 
memory, fiction, and fact: obfuscating everything of the immediate: now.
Lasting isn’t really the point anyway, is it. Tell that to the white poplar,
 
wind-resistant but short-lived. Waterside genus, at home in poetry of one
Emily Dickinson, you remember #260, where Nobody becomes a form of
 
 
resistance—

Laurel Review Issue 52.2 Fall 2019