Fallen Firs

My Backyard

When I was a child, my backyard was a sanctuary rife with the flora of the temperate rainforest inhabiting the greater part of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest.

Two cherry trees marked the sides, exchanging pollination in creation, displaying their beauty each April as flower petals fell like God herself blessing me with the tears of angels. Each May, my tongue was stained and belly filled as ripe red cherries replaced the silky white flowers.

In the back of my yard, small plum and apple trees planted at the births of my sister and I stood grounded in their position in the yard as the branches of my sister and I emerged from our family tree. Having been uprooted thrice before taking roots in their final place, they too were young, growing with their backs to the shade and their branches too twisted to make sense.

We never ate from the apple tree in the back-left. Poking through the corner, her immensity was obscured until one stood on the barren soil protected by her umbrella. As if her giantess yielded too great of a power, for us to eat from her fruit would be a betrayal of her being. Instead, the apples would fall in their time and the dogs would play until the fruit and fallen leaves co-mingled in decay.

But, at the very back of the yard, behind the baby plum and apple tree, behind the bushes sprouting up against the chain-link fence to supplement the mark of humanity’s constructed claims with nature’s instinctive privacy, behind even the chain-link fence confirming the neighbor’s claim instead of our own, my twin firs towered as high as the sun. They were my protectors. To a child unable to see their peaks, the firs would reach to space. Imaginary-me would jump from branch root to branch root to pick the dragon eggs (unknowing the whiteness of fresh pine cones), climbing and jumping until my head was in outer space and I would see my family and sister below calling me to return to the grounded earth in my yard. They watched over my imaginary life with as much consideration as they watched over my real life—growing and protecting me from reality outside of my yard.

These firs were my rock. When the twin towers fell, mine were still standing. When my parents separated, my guardians were still together. When the troubled weight of puberty crushed too strong, my role models were still standing weightless against the sky.

Eventually, like the baby birds, it was my time to leave the nest and the nest I did leave. I saw the Eastern Hemlock of the mid-Atlantic, the great oaks of Minnesota threatened by bur oak blight, and rolling grass hills and hiking trails decorated by pasture and stone walls in Northern England, but my firs were still at home protecting my family while I wasn’t.

I returned to find a markedly changed landscape over the course of just six years.

The baby apple and plum trees fell first. Their crookedness from too many moves and too many heavy snowfalls did not ease well for the aridity and reduced water in the clouds and ground. The cherry tree on the right had died nearly overnight, the neighbor’s chainsaws commencing the funeral procession. Since then, his partner on the right grieves the fall of her cross-pollinator, lamenting her loss by producing too few cherries. The apple tree in the back continues to command. Her weightedness seems more prominent as her branches dance on the ground, creating a canopy of seclusion. Could she know the fate of her friends?

But the most affecting loss that compelled my inner child to weep was the death of one my twin firs. Ashen brown, its branches curled in expiration. I saw why conifers don’t lose their needles in the winter, their barrenness exposing and embarrassing like the nakedness of an elderly relative. Only the crows sat atop the dead fir, further confirming death’s arrival.

In time, the tree was removed. Torn down over the course of several weeks to leave behind the full burden of my family’s protection to his lone brother. Already, the loudened traffic from the main street a quarter mile down infiltrated the refuge of my yard. But most saddening, I think of the other twin, the one still rife with life and still stationed as my protector. How horrid would it be to lose your wombmate to such preventable fate? Unable to uproot, standing next to the carcass of your brother, then standing next to the opening of past’s kinship.

My Backyard Beyond

The timing of the twin fir’s fall laid a precursor for the fate of the wider Oregonian forests. Later that summer, the wildfires ravaged through 500,000 acres in the state alone and the void left by my fallen tree allowed the orange-tinted sky to spread a fuller canvas over my Salem home.

My breath held tight as I watched the fire maps announce the fiery arrival to my favorite local hiking spot at Silver Falls State Park. Thinking of all the firs succumbing to the engulfing flames, my home already felt less protected, the air less oxygenated.

As the fire-fated firs fell, with the changing climate’s decreased moisture and increased temperatures facilitating the spread of a starting spark, I thought of my own fir falling victim to the aridity brought on by climate change. What’s worse: a fighting chance despite routine thirst over a lengthened period of time, or a quick yet inescapable blaze to announce one’s end?

The Douglas Fir, distinguished beyond Oregon’s state tree christening, adorning our license plates and government documents with the assertion of ownership—Oregon is of the fir. We are of the tree, breathing by its photosynthesis, shaded by its greatness, sheltering in its lumber. It gives to us in all its capacity, yet we claim domination when we alter its atmosphere, disrupt its water flows, and clear-cut its community on the hillsides.

Oregon has had a history of conflict surrounding logging and poor forest management practices that have been attributed to the acceleration of such a mega-fire season this year. Still, political tensions stand across the charred lines pointing blame to the loggers or the climate deniers or the governor and her inaction on climate change or forest management. The prosperity of our state’s cultural assemblage is not only threatened by our geophysical alterations, but also by partisanship and inflamed tensions.

I think of the great migration of the birds, beetles, rabbits, and squirrels who are made refugees after the burning of their habitat. I think of how the charred trees will be removed eventually, like my fir. Instead of displaying the dead carcass as a symbol of systems failure and the imminent threat of climate change, we will leave an open abyss of educational and experiential erasure.

The smoke from the skies has dissipated and the wildfires are mostly contained—for this year. It’s hard to feel relieved at the clean airs when I think of the fires’ destruction in my favorite natural areas. It’s hard to breathe better when I think of the families who lost their material and emotional comforts, whose own protectors fell victim to the spreading flames. It’s hard to enjoy the Autumn when I think of next year’s fire season and the indifference of our leaders to enact any tangible climate action despite having nearly 40 years of scientific support. It’s hard to look at the hole where my tree once stood and think of how many more of his brothers will never grace our breaths again.

The Woods Inside

Because the world outside
is all inside—
except for the woods,
which I keep trying to bring in.

Leaf and flower, rock and mossy bark—
fallen worlds.
I look for leavings,
brought low by the wind,
submerged by a storm,
undermined already.

I will not have the hand
of an executioner,
only of a grave robber.

Leaf and flower, rock and mossy bark—
I wish I could swallow them
and carry the woods
inside me—

The Sandwich that Luck Bought

I have always had bad luck. Luck so bad you could set your clock by it. What I mean is that if I flipped a coin and called heads 100 times in a row, that coin would show tails every time. What I mean is that I have never won a game of rock, paper, scissors.

After some extensive online research, I discovered most all my earthly problems are caused by a weakened luck muscle which, wouldn’t you know it, sits right at the base of your neck and out of sight.

One article I came across informed me of anti-wishes, and the little demons who wish them. It warned that luck is not something one has or does not have, but rather a thing you build and maintain. And wishing is to your luck what sit-ups are to your abdomen. Now isn’t that something?

People wish on a lot of things: dandelions, pennies, a clock that shows a certain time. But did you know? An eyelash wish is the best, the most concentrated, the likeliest-to-come-true wish. By far.

Now here’s the thing I messed up the most. A wish doesn’t just disappear when you don’t use it. Even fully grown, humans often struggle with object permanence. Think of when you’ve just gnawed on your nails or ran a hand through your hair. All the little bits of you these actions create. Flick the nail away; shake your fingers free of a loose strand; they’re forgotten. But they’re still around.

You can technically wish on anything. And if you ask me, you should. Nails, nose hairs, or 12:21. I do, just to be safe. My theory is that all these years, some malignant force has been using my unspent wishes against me. I imagine thousands upon thousands of these anti-wishes following me around, pinpricks of darkness which gather thick enough to block out the sun.

I’m always wishing nowadays, every day, on everything. It’s exhausting, but I can feel the muscle getting stronger. I’m hoping I can make up for lost time and start to turn my luck around.

Last month, for the first time in all my life, I found a penny on the ground. It was heads up. A different me would have walked right past it. Who cares about a penny? But the next day, I found another one. And the next day, and the next…

Some people say a penny doesn’t have any value. Did you know, in this day and age, it costs more to make a penny than the dang thing’s worth? When they find one on the sidewalk, most people don’t even bother picking it up.

30 days have gone by since my new routine. For 30 days I’ve found a penny heads up on the ground, picked it up, and held it to the light like a little miracle. And to me it is.

I keep all my miracles in a jar on my kitchen counter at home. A penny may be useless on its own, but if I keep this up, someday down the line I could buy myself lunch. The sandwich that luck bought. Now wouldn’t that be something?

The Goldfish

The bloody fish is long dead; you appear to be still very much alive – if a little ruffled by time. But it’s been more than fifteen years, so of course you look older now. Can’t even call yourself a girl anymore, can you? In fact you look a lot like your mum in those grainy photos from the ’80s that you used to keep in fading albums with pressed flowers on the front: big hair and blue eyeshadow and holding Baby You in her arms.

Now the door of the pub across the road with the hangman’s noose on the peeling sign opens to cough out some smokers and the Rolling Stones are blaring out; of course it will make you think, Me and Leah would be there right now, if this was 15 years ago. A group of you probably, none of you with jobs yet but somehow still able to afford endless drinks, talking happy shit that seemed important and not knowing yet what time really meant.

Now look at you – sitting upright in a café with a pot of tea in front of you like you’re something Alan Bennett wrote. Time’s a colossal bitch.

At this moment, as though responding to this thought, you look down at your stomach – still clearly sticking out more than it ought to since the baby – and you’re studying your hands. Who cares? You’re fine, of course.

Leah’s late, like always, that’s what you’re thinking – and of course you don’t even know why you’re here, do you? She didn’t give a damn about me really – or anyone, you’re thinking. It was all her, in the end – she turned everything back to herself, even the day poor Grandma drowned in the pond.

About time to ask yourself: why does she want to meet up when it’s been so long you can’t even remember what it was that made you lose contact in the first place? (Only of course that’s not true – you remember well enough, don’t you? It’s just you’ve moved on.) Goldfish are morons, anyway, that’s well known; 10-second memory, that’s what they say (although maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing sometimes; a fish tank is a fish tank is a fish tank).

And then He was…but none of it was worth it; post-adolescent drama, in that flat with the wonky doorways and the smell of tobacco and old food and the stain on the bathroom carpet and the fleas that hadn’t really been fleas. Leah and Laura’s place; Laura and Leah.

You must have been happy there, once, mustn’t you? Yes, surely somewhere inside – deep, deep inside – you miss that festering flat like you’d miss an arm or a leg, or a piece of your brain that had to be cut out because it was rotten. But somehow the window – the one where you stayed together and grew old, two old women living in the same nursing home and losing your minds together so it’s not so buggeringly lonely – that window slammed shut and a different one opened and one of you crawled out of it.

It wasn’t your fault though, was it? Why did Leah do it? you’re wondering again. Why does she destroy things?

The door of the café swings open now and you glance up, and you’re thinking maybe that selfish bint has finally arrived. But it’s an old tramp with his head done up in a ragged scarf and what look, even from this distance, like they might be piss-stains on his trousers but are probably something worse.

The people at the other table – the ones near the door – are sort of shrinking away like he’s the plague. And he’s not doing very much, just swaying a little from side to side like people do sometimes when they’re starting to dance. Maybe that’s the problem – tramps don’t come into trendy eating establishments with elegantly shabby hand-hewn tables and a wide range of super smoothies and dance. It’s like he’s stumbled into the wrong picture and it’s ruined the composition. (Only sometimes the deliberate accident makes the art – who said that? Someone pretentious, most likely.)

Anyway he’s ruined their illusions, that’s what it is. He’s made them uncomfortable with his in-your-face poverty and his Otherness. That doesn’t belong at lunch, although they wouldn’t want to admit it. Bourgeois cunts, with their lattes and their poached-eggs-on-sourdough. We’re just trying to get on with our lives, they’re thinking. We’re not bad, for God’s sake, we’ve just had a long week and we want to kick back and relax and forget that the world’s a disaster and there’s Donald Trump and Brexit and climate change and war and migrants drowning by the boatload. What’s wrong with that? Only we can’t now – thanks, Mr Tramp. Fuckers.

Except you’re doing the exact same thing, of course, which is strange actually because you’d have been the first person to leap up and talk to him and offer him money or even bloody ask him to move in with you in the old days. Maybe, in fact, you’ve changed too, just like everyone else. But you were the one who was supposed to stay the same. That’s probably Leah’s fault too.

And to this day it’s unclear how it happened. The End. (There’s never really just one ending to something though, is there, when you really think about it? – more a series of endings.) And it’d been a good week, too, for you anyway: you’d got work, and you’d been accepted on that art course or whatever it was for the autumn.

And then you came home that day to find it happening on the floor of the sitting room with Hefner on the stereo – you hated that, dirges you said, you never had the same taste in music – half a bottle of vodka down and your videos lying all over the floor (imagine – people still had videos back then) with some of the boxes covered in a kind of sticky substance. Something had made a mess of Julia Roberts’s face. Shit movie anyway. So was that it? The bloody videos? Is that what did it? I can look down on this scene now, from the future here, like I’m floating up in the corner of the room near the cobweb that neither of us ever got round to brushing away. I could have turned to the spider and said, what do you make of all of this, eight-eyes? Don’t trust them though, spiders. Why do they feel they need so many eyes anyway?

That’s the stupid thing: he was just a man. A man of all things. And you could have forgiven me – should have done – but it must have been the videos, right? That’s what must have pushed you over the edge. But it was only stuff; why dismantle everything over some stuff?

Oh, and the goldfish of course; that too. I can still see it in its murky green tank: blank eyes with nothing behind them, and yet they still manage to look accusing.

“Nice tits.”

The guy’s got grey junkie’s skin and seems to have some teeth missing, but maybe I ought to be grateful for the attention all the same. I almost want to shout back, “you should have seen them 10 years ago,” only he’s already weaved off to wherever it is people like him go.

And now he’s distracted me from the scene across the street in the café. I go back to trying to study your face again from the safety of my spot behind the bus shelter – to imagine again what you might be thinking – but you’ve gotten up. Have you thought better of it and left after coming all the way down here? And it took a year between deciding I really had to write that email and actually bringing myself to do it, and maybe this is the only chance I’ll get.

But no – you’re still there. You’ve just gotten up and walked over to the swaying tramp. You put your hand on his arm and you’re saying something to him. Bleeding heart. Always had to be fixing people; fixing me, even – or at least you tried.

But the winter sun is shining in through the window now, just at the place you’re standing, like it knew, and I imagine I can almost see your eyes. I wonder if your little girl has the same blue eyes as you, or whether she has someone else’s eyes.

I’ve dressed carefully today, and maybe in some sad way it’s because I want you to know I’m doing alright, money-wise in any case. Just so you don’t think I need you – just so there’s no mistake. Heels, even. And a red Alexander McQueen coat (it was eBay, but still).

Only now I wish I looked the way you’d remember me: black dress over torn jeans and hair long and all over my face and barely any make-up, just mascara and the merest hint of messy eyeliner (not artfully messy, just because I couldn’t do it properly). You might not like how I am now – all carefully highlighted hair and red lipstick and sinews. I know how I look – after all, I’m the one who did it – but you were never the sort of person to be impressed by appearances anyway. Look at you – you’ve barely bothered to brush your hair.

Now you’re handing the tramp something and you’re giving him a bit of a pat on the shoulder and he’s shuffling off. Saint. And that ray of sunshine has disappeared behind a cloud, and I become aware again of the street sounds in the background: a car horn gives a long burst, someone shouts “Oi, come back!,” a baby’s crying, a seagull’s screaming, a bus roars past with a warm rush of wind full of dust particles that I breathe in and it blocks my view of you for a moment. But it’s all happening outside of what really matters, because I’m still looking at you and the music’s still coming out of the pub – Ruby Tuesday. You said I listened to music too much on my own and I never let the real world in. But I’m not afraid to be alone, I always told you that.

I am frightened though, is that different?

Was it you? Or me? Or was it something else altogether? Why did you leave, over some videos and a goldfish for crying out loud?

I take a step forward, to cross the street and join you in the café, but then a car comes out of nowhere and honks its horn at me and it actually clips the side of my hovering foot. For a second there’s the shock of the contact with the hot tyre, and I see the face of the old guy in the hat inside; half alarmed, half accusing (stupid bloody woman), and then he’s gone and I’m left with a sharp pain in my ankle. People look at me with their mouths hanging open but they say nothing and I’d like them to die.

But maybe that wasn’t how I let you down after all, and maybe I’ve known it all along. A mistake – that’s what it was. She’ll forgive me. Laura’ll forgive me because that’s what she does. She’ll understand that I wasn’t ready today in the end. One day maybe I will be.

I turn around and start walking, and I find I’m actually swallowing back sobs so I keep my head down because women in their thirties don’t walk down the street in broad daylight crying. I blink at the tears that are fighting to come out and for a moment it causes something to flash in front of my eyes, like an orb breaking through for a second from another plane of existence. (Or it could be my body has chosen this moment to have a stroke.)

Then behind me I hear, “Leah?”

So I stop dead and a woman with a pushchair behind me tuts and swerves to get by and she and her toothless pink baby both give me the Evil Eye.

I close my eyes and turn around, and when I open them it’s your trainers I see first: all scuffed and your jeans baggy but not the fashionable kind of baggy and Jesus does that matter? What does it say about me that I’ve seen you after all this time and all I can think about is your jeans? No wonder you left.

You didn’t leave me.

Now I let my eyes travel up your body to meet yours; totally blue – no little hint of any other specks of colour, just blue. I look at you and you look back at me and I know one of us has to say something at some point and that probably it should be me, but nothing seems adequate.

Finally, “I’m sorry about the goldfish.”

You’re silent for a moment.

Then you say: “Screw the goldfish.”

And I’ve known it all along really, haven’t I? What I should have been apologising for is everything else.

Your little mouth pulls itself into just the slightest smile, and I can see those tiny, neat teeth of yours. You reach out your arms.

Yes, screw it. Screw the goldfish.

I like the thought of being a lighthouse keeper

but back when the light

came from candles

their flames

tethered songbirds

I imagine watching them

sinking slow as shipwrecks

lightning another

when a sail swallowed

or torn from the mast

watching the thread of smoke

fracture the air

is there a darkhouse keeper?

someone who keeps the night twirling

throughout the day

who keeps the silhouettes sedated

within matchboxes

silk lined with smoke

a place where shadows

can slumber

and dream their dreams

of canaries singing

from behind the bars

of a rib-cage