Continuum

Starting at the gnarly root and ending
at the brittle head where the leaves

are sewn on and the finality of death
has attached, it peeks through the window

not shrilly, not overtly, but steadily
relentless. Like a stalker it gazes at the

strange sticks of lifeless wood on the
other side of the window where people

have sat to write and pray and eat and hurt,
to grow randy, to jubilate, to despair.

The dead tree has no eyes to gaze with. Its
blind yet somehow sees the bookshelves

crammed with years of unable-to-figure-it-out,
crammed with tomes read long ago and

Neither touched nor remembered since.
The dead tree in the window somehow sees the

tchochkes, the worthless junk that is the
accumulation of a life, the manifestation of

the pages of a diary, fossilizing on the
carpet, waiting until the day of discovery,

waiting for the soul inside lying on the floor
unable to see the plant-face at the window.

Brian Yapko is a lawyer whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Grand Little Things, Society of Classical Poets, Poetica, Chained Muse, Garfield Lake Review, Tempered Runes Press, Auroras and Blossoms, Sparks of Calliope and as a first prize winner in The Abstract Elephant. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his husband, Jerry, and their canine child, Bianca.