Vertical

Linda Pastan - 1932-2023

Perhaps the purpose
of leaves is to conceal
the verticality
of trees
which we notice
in December
as if for the first time:
row after row
of dark forms
yearning upwards.
And since we will be
horizontal ourselves
for so long,
let us now honor 
the gods
of the vertical:
stalks of wheat
which to the ant
must seem as high
as these trees do to us,
silos and
telephone poles,
stalagmites
and skyscrapers.
but most of all
these winter oaks,
these soft-fleshed poplars,
this birch
whose bark is like
roughened skin
against which I lean 
my chilled head,
not ready 
to lie down.

For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming. Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate New Year's Eve by counting my annual dead. My mother, when she was dying, spoke to her visitors of books and travel, displaying serenity as a form of manners, though I could tell the difference. But when I watched you planning for a life you knew you'd never have, I couldn't explain your genuine smile in the face of disaster. Was it denial laced with acceptance? Or was it generations of being English-- Brontë's Lucy in Villette living as if no fire raged beneath her dun-colored dress. I want to live the way you did, preparing for next year's famine with wine and music as if it were a ten-course banquet. But listen: those are hoofbeats on the frosty autumn air.

I married you for all the wrong reasons, charmed by your dangerous family history, by the innocent muscles, bulging like hidden weapons under your shirt, by your naive ties, the colors of painted scraps of sunset. I was charmed too by your assumptions about me: my serenity— that mirror waiting to be cracked, my flashy acrobatics with knives in the kitchen. How wrong we both were about each other, and how happy we have been.

I'm only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I'll be gone forever— the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I'd need for an eternity of traveling light. I've left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and heating dinner. But like the weather front they warn is on its way with its switchblades of wind and ice, our lives have minds of their own.

Between forest and field, a threshold like stepping from a cathedral into the street— the quality of air alters, an eclipse lifts, boundlessness opens, earth itself retextured into weeds where woods once were. Even planes of motion shift from vertical navigation to horizontal quiescence: there’s a standing invitation to lie back as sky’s unpredictable theater proceeds. Suspended in this ephemeral moment after leaving a forest, before entering a field, the nature of reality is revealed.

Poems

Vertical

More by Linda Pastan

The Cossacks

I Married You

Traveling Light

Related Poems

Crossings

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