The map of what’s been cut
from here clear up to Maine
since the incursions
shows that almost all
of the originals and everything
within and on them
shuddered and were rudely
taken, rudely told
their squatting days were over.
Mr. Doyen used to sip his clear booze
in a clear glass, poring
over maps of places
he would never see in person.
I’d stand by his armchair, asking
what this cartographic feature was
or that, intending to appear
like someone who would not be
smoking weed so deeply
in his son’s Camaro minutes hence.
The ways we should and should not be
successors to the fathers
are negotiated somehow
by a spirit in an ice cave.
After overdoing it one night
as an advanced adult,
I woke and drove northwest
to Goshen, where a black gum
has been living mostly incognito
for the last six-hundred years.
I hiked in to the swampland,
and I saw there was no way
I’d find the old-growth tupelo
without some serious guidance
and was happy for the failure.
In the spirit of the Widow Douglas,
I took snuff
and drove to Massachusetts
where the oldest tree is in a forest
under state protection
and accessible to such as me.
I sat beneath the eastern hemlock
who was born around the time
of Shakespeare’s mother,
and I wondered if such context
was another species of diminishment.
I camped that night nearby
the hemlock, and I don’t remember
fretting over lifespans
or mysterious allotments.
I fasted on the third day
and apologized to nature
for the fumes that trailed me
up to Buel’s Gore, where I shut the car off
at a trailhead and had visions
of the eastern hemlock that has lived
the last five-hundred years
below the Camel’s Hump
on which I stood two hours later, clueless
as to who the eldest was or why
my torso tingled so.
The next day I replenished
my electrolytes but otherwise
ingested nothing but an eighth
of mushrooms on my way east
to New Hampshire and the black gum
who has lived there since
we’ll call it 1323, three centuries
before New Hampshire ever was.
I found the road that ended
well shy of the wetlands,
and I wondered who I was
to think it was okay
to try and get a handle on longevity
and loss by serially invading
what should be inviolate.
I parked two car lengths
from a brand-new Cherokee that idled,
and I couldn’t say if I had heard
an outcry ever for the model’s name change.
I decided I would look
at black gums from afar,
without interior narration,
but I saw the woman slumped
against the steering wheel,
her brown hair lustrous, widespread
down her back, no scarring
of a tree ring in the black gums,
no contraction to record her passing
at the age of twenty-nine.
John Popielaski is the author of a novel, The Hollow Middle (Unsolicited Press), as well as a few poetry collections, including the chapbook Isn't It Romantic? (Texas Review Press). His poems have recently appeared in such journals as Clade Song, Poetrybay, Roanoke Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig.