Lynne McMahon

He Takes Me to See the Oldest Tree

            in Missouri, a burr oak, the oxidized plaque
faintly states, which so dominates the landscape
                        he calls it Wordsworth
(there’s even a companion oak across the road,
also gigantic, and nearly equal in girth,
            Coleridgian in its effort to be
                        the other tree or have, at least,

            the other tree acknowledge it). The field
is lipped in tansy, planted in soy, only eight miles
                        on the old railroad bed,
and we’re on bikes, a nothing hike in Wordsworth’s
day, but I’m out of breath by the time we stop,
            and whatever oblation I’ve brought runs down
                        my throat instead.

            He’s led me here for vasteness’s sake
and elegy: “but there’s a Tree, of many, one
                        a single Field which I
have looked upon....” But what’s gone from me
is not yet here, only hinted at today—my father’s failing
            memory, my mother’s anxious heart,
                        and the part of the poem

            I most want to keep
is the meanest flower, which he takes for me
                        and places in a Krinos jar
to carry home “in the holiness of the heart’s
affection,” as Keats once said. Not for the dead,
            but for our own bodies
                        in our marriage bed.

LYNNE MCMAHON has published several collections of poetry, the latest of which, Sentimental Standards, is forthcoming in 2003 from David R. Godine.

“He Takes Me to See the Oldest Tree” appears in our Winter 2001 issue.

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