Driftwood Novena: Day Eight

Driftwood

Novena: Day Eight

Drifting doesn’t begin as drifting.

In the beginning, it is a rooted thing

(though before that it had to be

a thing planted from the seed

and that seed maybe from another

rooted thing though who knows

how far it had come to lodge

where it was and sprung from)

and so in the beginning we twined

like vines up the cellar wall

and made a game of being

the first to reach the sun, to make it

out.  And there’s no one beginning

place, even if it is from the same

root that the main trunk splits, even

though from a distance it seems

obvious and a birch like the one we have

at home is clear as any primer Y.

Still, I’ve climbed that tree, needing to

see if there was something solid

between the two trunks sprung from

the main and climbing I set my mind

like the girl in Jewett’s Pointed Fir

story and though mine was a birch

it didn’t seem to matter because

weren’t we after the same things?

Coming up to that breach though,

with maybe one or two stolen barnboards

to begin a floor to the bridge I’d planned

to span, I must’ve nudged the nest

of some flying stinging thing.,  Before I fell

I looked into the space between it

and it was black and swirly like

an aurora.  Today I’ll say I was dizzy,

that some vertigo tucked itself up

under my ribs and pushed up and down

like a plunger and I lost my grip on it all

and fell back, watching the canopy web

above me, yellow green leaves touching

like applause, and though many

of the dead branches that I broke through

went back to the  earth, or they have

by now, it’s sad still because if the sea

were closer and they could’ve floated

off on high tide and got somewhere

got many any wheres, they then could've been  

found, velvet mellow and grey years later, they

would’ve been shouted out with joy,

as a shard at a dig—small, a bitty thing,

but a treasure, someone's been here before,

yes, a treasure, and of survival no less.