by MaryAnne Hafen
My mountains bleed into my sky
on paper, and it looks wrong,
but it’s like real life;
virgo at summer’s end.
The world is too strange
to paint as it really is, too filled
with poorly pruned trees.
My dad cut the mulberry tree
in our front yard
off at the thick arms,
a stump with stubs sprouting
whip-like limbs—simulacrum
of a weeping willow, but mutilated.
That’s real life, mulberries
with deadpan club hands
shielding a little girl from
the mandate of ignored chores.
Foxtail trees in the scree
are shaped by intense winds
up so high, snow lops off
branches before they can reach,
the end result a fantastical
sculpture more erosion demo
than organism, half-dead trunk
stuck with hobbit hands;
to replicate life right
is to see it all wrong.
MaryAnne Hafen is a conservationist with an affinity for desert plants. She lives at the outskirts of the Great Basin region of the American West. Her poetry has appeared in Quarter(ly) and Consecrate/Desecrate.
Hawaii Pacific Review 