Poem-A-Day: The Bride Tree Can't Be Read by Brenda Hillman

October 28, 2013 The Bride Tree Can't Be Read by Brenda Hillman     The bride tree puts down its roots  below the phyla. It is there  when we die & when we are born,  middle & upper branches reaching  the planet heart by the billions  during a revolution we don't see.    Quarks & leptons are cooling  on their infant stems, spinning the spinning  brain of matter, fled to electrical dark  water, species with names the tree  can hold in the shale shade brought  by the ambulance of art;    no one but you knows what occurred  in the dress you wore in the dream  of atonement, the displaced tree in  the dream you wore, a suffering endurable  only once, edges that sought release  from envy to a more endurable loss,    a form to be walked past, that has  outworn the shame of time,  its colors sprung through description  above a blaze of rhizomes spreading  in an arable mat that mostly  isn't simple but is calm & free--       Copyright © 2013 by Brenda Hillman. Used with permission of the author.   About This Poem "A few months ago, I ran past a flowering plum tree in Berkeley, at its height of its flowering; I had been speaking with a friend about the economic doom that is happening--no matter what they say about 'economic recovery'--and about a struggle she was having in a relationship. I started thinking about 'between' zones in everything: between perceptions, between sound and sense, between ease & fear, between landscape & dreamscape. I like images in poetry that can apply simultaneously to things like plants and soil and to an invisible spirit world and to linguistic constructs. The horrors of an economy that serves so few and the friend's woes were in my mind when I wrote the first two stanzas, but there was a shift during the writing. In forms of life other than human, there is a vitality that isn't trapped in the sorrow. There may be an arable mat that is beyond our ability to harm it, or a collective unconscious. What would ease my friend's pain? The passage of time, or simply remembering a moment of undemanding beauty. A dress you wore, even if you no longer own that dress." --Brenda Hillman Most Recent Book by Hillman Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan University Press, 2013)              Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.   Brenda Hillman is the author of numerous books of poems, including Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). She is the recipient of the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship and holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at St. Mary's College in California.   Related Poems The Wishing Tree by Kathleen Jamie The Weight by Linda Gregg If You Go into the Woods You Will Find It Has a Technology by Heather Christie __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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