My daughter, who used to be shy,
gave me a lecture on dendrology once.
We were up in the Michigan woods;
she said some trees know how
to give each other space, retracting
at the top when other trees need
light and air: “crown shyness.”
It’s true: if you look you can see sky
faintly rimming their branches,
a delicate way they have of refraining
from judgment. There’s grace in it
somewhere. This kind of thing
moves me almost to tears.
I thought about you and me, how we
talked from our beds, lights out in the dorm,
listening to Barbra Streisand on your
old stereo. Did I tell you the night
my grandfather died, when I sobbed
straight through to morning, I knew you
were awake, saying nothing, quietly
holding me up? I could hear us breathing
in the dark, growing leaves in a forest
we made together, keeping boundaries,
keeping each other alive.
I suppose it’s the same way with daughters,
though I thought I’d have mine forever.
That maybe was the point of her lesson,
trees shifting in a breeze, July, as we stood
there in wonder, sunlight filtering, not flooding,
right down to their spreading roots.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 1.
Diane Scholl is Professor Emerita of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where she taught American and modern British literature, as well as “The Writer’s Voice.” Her poems have been published in Cider Press Review, Last Stanza Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, among other places. In 2019 her chapbook, Salt, was published by Seven Kitchens Press. Growing up in a Norwegian-American family in Brooklyn, New York, she learned to love the varied cultural roots of her neighborhood, as well as summers in the Hudson Valley, the scene of her poem “Under the Night Sky.”
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