Root and Branch
Cleaning out an old room
A lungful of dust
And a handful of
Goods and services
From a time
Before my own
I came by a book
On horticulture
Out of print long
Before my DNA
Was in print
It was a handsome tome
Of faded green
And loamy brown
Its pages were singed
With hoary orange
Like a fox’s tail
And its smell
Put images of an
Old printing press
In a building made of stone
Run by smoking men
There shirt sleeves rolled up
Revealing big forearms
I opened the book
With a papery creak
And turned to a page
At random
When a tree dies
It does not have to be the end
The page told me
It can be saved
A limb can be shorn
And grown in a new place
Life can find a way
Nestled beside the words
Was a drawing in chalk
Of a grizzly ancient arbour
That the author claimed
Was a thousand years old
Oak tree
In the north of England
Where the land between the seas is at
Its narrowest
And the salty wind howls
And keens
It was saved
Half a decade
Before the author raised his pen
A single root
And
A single branch
Were shorn by expert hands
And grafted onto
The sapling of
Another oak
A thousand years apart
And now
Together as one
The author informed me
And anyone else who had ever cared to read
His book
That the verdant surgery
Had been a success
And the ancient oak now lived on
I closed the book and
Carefully put it on the top of a box
Of other such old works
Aware that I still had a room
To clean out
But for the rest of the afternoon
While my body hoisted and
Shifted
My mind reminded with that tree in the
North of England
And as the sun set
Outside the streaky window
Into the ocean
Without so much as a fizz
Or a pop
I wondered if I
Would ever get the chance to start
Again like that
And if I did
Would I make the most
Of it