The Marriage in the Trees

By Stanley Plumly b. 1939 Stanley Plumly

When the wind was right everything else

was wrong, like the oak we thought built

better than the house split like a ship

on a rock. We let it stand the winter,

spectral, shagged, every sky its snow,

then cut it down, dismantled it in

pieces like disease. Then limbs from

the yellow poplar broke at will—

fell from the heights like bones

of the Puritans; even to gather them

in bundles seemed puritanical.

And the willow, by its nature, wept

long tears of its overbranching,

so pale they were autumnal. These

we turned too easily to switches,

mocking the bickering in the spruce's

nesting eaves, which crows, then jays

bothered all they could. The list,

the list. The sycamore made maps

of disappearance; the copper beech,

parental in its girth, was clipped

hard, by a car, with a wound that wouldn't

heal. Doctoring, then witchery, then

love—nothing we tried would work.

More apple trees that grew nowhere

but down. More maples spilling sugar.

More hawthorns blazing out, telling truth.

Stanley Plumly, "The Marriage in the Trees" from Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2000 by Stanley Plumly. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc, www.harpercollins.com.

Source: Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2000)

Biography

PLUMLY, Stanley (1939– ), was born in Barnesville, Ohio, and grew up in the lumber and farming regions of Virginia and Ohio. His father was a lumberjack and welder. He was educated at Wilmington College, a Quaker school in Ohio, and Ohio University. In 1985 he married the poet Deborah Digges. He is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. His first collection, In the Outer Dark (Baton Rouge, La., 1970), won the . . .

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