Michael Diehl, Sunset 2
Russian Olive
Under its branches, I picnicked with Mom
days before it fell in a late summer storm
and crushed the stand-alone garage. Odd
that the tree’s wide canopy had spared
our small, backyard plot of tomatoes
and the hand-me-down, rust-covered
swing set that squeaked in the wind
even without anyone sitting on it.
When we moved in, our first civilian home,
someone else gave us a fish tank complete
with plastic castle, fake ferns, a dozen guppies,
and an angel fish that kept staring, no matter
where I stood. Then, wall-to-wall carpeting—
no shoes in the house after that, I’d have to tell
any new friends I’d make to remove theirs.
All my young life, always stationed
at one Fort after another, I hadn’t known
that so many things I thought we owned
stayed at the military base when we moved.
Now, on the shelf above the kitchen sink,
a new radio tuned to my parents’ station—
their music, their news. Unless you counted
the fish, no pets, though no one was allergic.
It took ten days before men came
and hauled away the tree. Afterwards
I walked through that foreign land
to the clean, wide stump, its odor tangy
and strange, its rings I’d count one afternoon
for no good reason. Above me, a wide stretch
of dull blue, cloudless and thin,
sky that had been there all along, as if nothing
had been wounded, nothing gone.
________________
Andrea Hollander
Review by Paul Willis
My wife grew up in a military family that constantly moved from base to base, and this poem catches that essential sense of homelessness. Her family’s “first civilian home” was likewise a place to treasure, but in the poem, this new place of permanence, this putting down of roots at last, is negated in part by the blowdown of the large, spreading Russian olive on the property—as if to suggest that even a true home can betray us.