COLLECTING BRANCHES

COLLECTING BRANCHES

Cottonwoods split their skins:

deep crevices, spongy bark

they grow

slowly outliving branches

old limbs having left their sockets

puffy eyes around every trunk:

slow healing amputations

Cottonwoods are always half dead

one long twiggy arm stiff among

leaves of another: the conjoined twin that

didn't live.

Among the last speckled yellow-red

I'm trying to shed something of myself:

the part that creaks when the storm rises

threatens our house each night

I've left too long

what should've been pulled down, burned.