Chokecherry
mutual ruin & bitter medicine
You can live a long time half-choked,
mistaking survival for peace
But growing around the ruin,
is its own kind of healing
The dirt remembers
Before the strangling started, it was clean
I was a skinny thing then,
a chokecherry sapling built for white lace blossoms
and fruit that stained the fingers without needing to hide
like something nobody bothered to wipe off the counter
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Back then the crows still landed here
Back then the rain fell straight
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Then you came crawling up out of the ditch,
all creek-water and burrs,
dragging your long body through the weeds
until you found something smaller than you
stretching pale toward a little scrap of sky
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The bark smelled sour in the August heat
You climbed up slow
That’s how stranglers do it
Slow as smoke filling a room
nobody thinks they’ll die in
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You wrapped yourself around my trunk
like I was built to hold you up
Every season another twist
Another inch stolen from the sun
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You said you were keeping the wind off me
while my branches stretched for light
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And every good thing in the ground
seemed to find your mouth first
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My young self bent under you
Cracked like an old kitchen chair
The buds dried up in the throat
before they ever saw morning
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At night I could hear you moving
Little rope-creaks in the dark
Like somebody tightening a belt
out behind a garage
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Even the moon looked jaundiced through your leaves
Still, I tried to bloom
Every spring I pushed blossoms out
like busted teeth through swollen gums
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Mean little ghosts of cherries
Hardly enough there to keep the birds
But you kept feeding
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Now you stand out there in the weeds
weeping into your sleeve,
pointing at my crooked spine
like you didn’t do the twisting
Holding out your basket
Expecting something sweet
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
Bitter fruit makes good medicine
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
For years I kept my branches pulled in close
Stayed small, stayed quiet
Played dumb
I stunted my own growth
just to keep your weight from splitting me apart
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Squeezed sugar from cold earth and hard rain
to survive another season tangled up in you
Let my leaves rattle
to whatever cheap tune you whistled through your teeth
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But the heartwood turned stubborn
Sap moves through me now
like river water in January
Slow. Cold. Clear enough
to see bones underneath
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
The grain’s gone hard as old fenceposts
You don’t get to carve yourself into it anymore
You don’t get to choose which branch gets the axe
You don’t get to stand in my shade
and be surprised by the dark
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
I see your leaves blackening at the edges now
Hear the dry sickness settling at your root
That blight belongs to you, friend
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
You had summer after summer
to loosen yourself from my throat
Let light reach where it could
That’s it
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But uncoiling takes work,
and some things grow so used to the chokehold
they mistake it for an embrace
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Now the whole damn canopy has gone out
The crows don’t land here anymore
Even the rain falls sideways around this place
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Still,
the wood keeps swelling
Some nights I hear the vines giving way,
when the cold comes down hard
But they’ve held on so long
I can’t always tell
where your crookedness ends
and my branches begin,
and what’s still moving through it
Still here
still growing wrong on my own terms
and it heals, rough as weather
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
The dirt remembers
This was written for Nimila’s photo prompt seen above.
Thanks for being here.
Until next time,
j
This was beautiful, through all the hurt, just beautiful. You made something ugly into art. Forgive me if I'm off.
Astonishingly, achingly beautiful. And difficult too... because a metaphor can be expressed this perfectly only when it comes from personal experience.. so my heart breaks for you, and for every reader who sees this as clearly as you have written it.