Tree Ferns

By Stanley Plumly b. 1939 Stanley Plumly

They were the local Ohio palm, tropic in the heat of trains.

They could grow in anything—pitch, whole grain,

cinders, ash and rust, the dirt

dumped back of the foundry, what

the men wore home. Little willows,

they were made to be brushed back by the traffic of boxcars

the way wind will dust the shade

of the small part of a river.—They'd

go from almost green to almost gray with each long passing,

each leaf, each branch a stain

on the winded air. They were too thin

for rain—nothing could touch them.

So we'd start with pocketknives, cutting and whittling them down,

from willow, palm, or any other name.

They were what they looked like. Horsewhip, whipweed.

They could lay on a fine welt if you wanted.

And on a hot, dry day, July, they could all but burn.

At a certain age you try to pull all kinds of things

out of the ground, out of the loose gravel thrown by trains.

Or break off what you can and cut it clean.

Stanley Plumly, "Tree Ferns" 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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