Rowan Tree
This time I got everything wrong again.
The tree: it was red. And the sky was gray.
Tomorrow ran off with today today.
I’d swallowed time just so I could get things
Right. I was a present to myself but went
Right past it. I called myself it and sat
With it, sad with it, and yet couldn’t find
The lie in it. It suited me to a
T. Without it, who would I be? I was
So tired but scared to say it: knowing
What tends to come after—I zipped it.
I parabolaed between parables,
Playing Bach’s Concerto in D-Minor,
BWV 974, for
The despair deep in it before
It falls towards the solution
Of its final chord. That’s when, in the great
Silver apogee of night, I stepped out
Into the warm air and stripped the rowan
That had been growing there bare until it
Was barely there, roots crowning its nadir,
And everywhere crowing beware beware.
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Excerpted from Silver: Poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. All rights reserved.
