Issue Thirty-Four - Summer 2019

The Bare Trees

By Anne Pitkin

It’s not summer’s greenery I love but winter’s
deciduous branches yearning upward, sky falling into them,
blue or darker blue, a star or two descending slowly, limb to limb.

Like an argument, they proceed, more often than not
complex but every iteration visible, one growing directly from the other.

Last summer in a storm, the robin’s nest blew to the ground.
We hadn’t even known about it, so hidden it was, the eggs now broken.

So many false promises in this world. Accept one
and your life can be ruined forever.

New Year’s Eve, along the avenue alders reached into the early evening
sky, clear and faintly rose colored. Reached above the traffic,
the walkers, the lit shops, into the no-nonsense emptiness

where the beauty offered no meaning, broke no vows.

Copyright 2019 Pitkin

Anne Pitkin 's work has appeared in One, Jacar Press, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Verse Daily and many others. She is an emerita editor of Fine Madness, a poetry magazine published in Seattle. Her full-length collections are YELLOW and WINTER ARGUMENTS. She is a sometime (before Covid) keyboard player with her friends.

All work by