The Revelation of Buried Arms

Painting by Sophie Lerlei



The Revelation of Buried Arms

The trees are spike-fingered hands, reaching.
The trees are hungry, but they’re not hungry for you.
Taste their slug-slow blood. It is warm
as sap can be. See the damp rot rise from
its bones; death does not need you in Maryland.
Death is well fed, here. It hardly smells your blood slowing,
your years tumbling out behind you.

Let us consider the naked branches, arms bereft
of adornment, hard to the touch and yet soft
and yet singular and yet common as clay.
The fading intentions of change. The necessary evil--remind me,
why is it necessary? Forgive me, forgive me; I can never
keep track of all the contradictions. Though Johnny may fly,
he has no wings. It’s difficult to explain without
reverting to abuse. You understand, don’t you? You will.

Those horrible trees; they ache along the thoroughfares,
the cracked streets, the boarded up buildings. They die
for us, who never even ask: Como te llamas? They only grasp,
hands, fingers, the revelations of buried arms
belonging to whom? To what? To when?


C.L.Bledsoe

Posted over on Hamilton Stone Review