AFTER

Inside the cream
of death, the nurturing
of groundwork,
when split
with roots and history,
the memory comes back.

The day you ruined Christmas.
Hock and honey, dark spices
of your mom
and sister, listless in their notness,
the memory a metal spout
in a syrup tree.

What finally
happens is
you can't eat sin,
the bouillabaisse
of the heart,
so you keep
softening.

Forget the worst days
of history. Yes,
even that. Not yet.
But that.  

__

DETAILED

I don't care what you call
love—a word I know
like wasp or water oak,
anatomized
as my knowledge
of nature, gleaned
from old encyclopedias.

You say love
is you-just-know.
But I saw the artist's rendering
like photography, the legs,
multiravenous eye,
graphic blood the color of maple syrup
in a diagram on how to puncture trees.          

__

G. K. Chesterton said: "A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door." When I was a kid, I saw an episode of (if I remember correctly) This Old House where the guys tapped a maple tree. It seemed like the weirdest thing to me, and it still does. It involved opening a kind of door, and opening doors is weird.