Kristin W. Davis

Kristin W. Davis is a former journalist and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast.  Her poetry has appeared in Passager, THINK, What Rough Beast, the Bay to Ocean anthology, and the Split this Rock blog and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “The Persistence of a Maple Tree” is part of a collection of documentary poems about Willowbrook State School, a defunct institution on Staten Island, N.Y., for people with intellectual and other disabilities that became notorious for the human rights abuses and hepatitis experiments that took place there. Her brother Michael was a resident at Willowbrook from 1962 until his death in 1971.

The Persistence of a Maple Tree

Limb in my grip, I’d walk my feet up the trunk, hookmy knees over, swing myself upright. Shelteredunder the leafy canopy, I hid from the weeping heat, spied on the big kids playing kickball in the street. 
When lightning struck in the night, I heard the crack and thud, the severed limb as it spiked wet earth. Along the path of the strike, sap boiled and steamed, stripped away layers of bark, left a sticky char.
Do not dress the wound, the arborist told my parents. Leave the cavity unfilled; prune away the dead branches. Time would erase all memory, a callus to sealthe exposed center, protect what needs to grow.
After the death, we left that house, that solitary tree, rooted in the yard. The wound hardened to heartwood,dead tissue at the core, dark matter that never decays. Heartwood steadies a tree; its rings accrue with time.
I stopped by our old house the other day, the aging maplelopsided but tall, lawn raked clean. I lay in its shade, let a root poke into my back. My hard-hearted tree filled the sky scarlet. Except above the scar: There, one blinding slice of sky.

Kristin W. Davis

The Persistence of a Maple Tree

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