#MIDDLEBURY
On Falling (Blue Spruce)
Joanna Klink
Dusk fell every night. Things
fall. Why should I
have been surprised.
Before it was possible
to imagine my life
without it, the winds
arrived, shattering air
and pulling the tree
so far back its roots,
ninety years, ripped
and sprung. I think
as it fell it became
unknowable. Every day
of my life now I cannot
understand. The force
of dual winds lifting
ninety years of stillness
as if it were nothing,
as if it hadn’t held every
crow and fog, emptying
night from its branches.
The needles fell. The pinecones
dropped every hour
on my porch, a constant
irritation. It is enough
that we crave objects,
that we are always
looking for a way
out of pain. What is beyond
task and future sits right
before us, endlessly
worthy. I have planted
a linden, with its delicate
clean angles, on a plot
one tenth the size. Some change
is too great.
Somewhere there is a field,
white and quiet, where a tree
like this one stands,
made entirely of
hovering. Nothing will
hold me up like that again.
About this poem
“We bought the house because of the spruce. It rose above all the other trees in this area of town and had its roots underneath a corner where people paused to talk. After it fell, in a windstorm so violent that fires broke out across Missoula, I received more than a hundred notes at my door – a few people wanting to work with the wood in a way that was equal to the tree, but most expressing grief. Even now, six months later, strangers will stop me to say, ‘It was something.'” – Joanna Klink
About Joanna Klink
Joanna Klink is the author of “Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy” (Penguin Books, 2015). She lives in Missoula, Mont.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Joanna Klink. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
