Tree with a Subtext

This acrostic poem about the red buckeye came about early in 2019, when Hendrix College, where I teach, was planning a poetry tree walk for Arbor Day. (Yes, if you’re thinking that “poetry tree walk” is the quintessential liberal arts event, you are right.)

Trees are the crowning glory of the Hendrix campus. To celebrate them, the college put together a walking tour led by a multidisciplinary trio consisting of a botany professor; a math professor who loves plants, knows campus history quite well, and could provide local color; and a literature professor who located poems about the exact species of trees that we walked around to admire. Unable to find a poem about the red buckeye—a beautiful small tree of the southern woodlands—she asked if I could write one. Here’s the result.

This poem was subsequently published in Cave Region Review: A Journal of Literary and Visual Art, Vol. 12, 2020.

Understory

All winter long you’re just underbrush, filler, thickening

Every woodsy dusk with the smudgy gray of your limbs.

So little under the big trees, you’re ur-scrub, bush-league,

Common and inconspicuous as the leafless weeks wear on. 

Until—look, tiny knobs at the fine ends of your branches.

Look, the unremarkable bark has tones of burgundy—

Until, at some tipping-point of light, you burst into leaf,

Small pleated fans like cocktail umbrellas that turn overnight to glossy green. Then

Panicles erupt, plumes of small, loose-lipped flowers, firecracker red. No wonder your seeds

Are a good-luck charm, poisonous though they are. No wonder the ruby-throats sip your sweet fire.

Vivid as blood, your petals reveal your true self. Little surprise that your crushed parts, strewn

In water, can stupefy fish for the kill, or that the pithy fibers of your heart can yield

A sable dye, ink for a darker subtext. Summer has outed you: red buckeye, you stand out now.