Katsura

I’ve been drawing you since I was a child.
I still have my pictures of you, crayoned
in green and brown. I know you

from dreams, from past lives.
I tell you private things:
I live in the human world. I tend

to the living and the dead.
May I touch you? Your bark
digs a road into my palm. Gold

pollen glitters on my arms.
The grass shies away from your
roots, stretched across the soil

like a dancer’s thighs. Do you remember
the first time you danced? You twirled,
a tiny seed-helicopter headed earthward.

The journey of a lifetime: yours, to grow
in one place; mine, to wander until
I found you, alone of all trees.

*

Raw Material

As I turn my compost pile
I think of how my mother looked
at anything unfinished on my plate.
I wish that I could send food back in time,
back to 1945 when hunger broke her down.
But everything moves forward, and
we all break down eventually:
first the flash of heat, then
the slow decomposition.

*

Wildfire

Already, we talk
as if it happened
to someone else, as if

we were children again,
in a perpetual state of
bewilderment, our youth

a shield against too much
knowing. When I was twelve,
the new dark age just a dust

cloud on the horizon,
I could not grasp the meaning
in the shift of the clouds,

nor the air’s brutal tang.
Had I known, what would
I have done? Today the rain

falls, and the trees droop
like a troupe of worn-out
performers after a final show,

bowing as the director
calls their names: red maple,
yellow birch, liquidambar.

*

Erica Goss is the winner of the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her poetry collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Her flash essay, “Just a Big Cat,” was one of Creative Nonfiction’s top-read stories for 2021. Recent and upcoming publications include Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.