Northwest ohio, I found a set of hidden stairs climbing up through the fog, old iron rails, water-dark wood, disappearing into the trees, and a grown over trail. At the top: a bench no one uses anymore, and an old tree splitting itself open above a flooded creek.
Two things live at the top of these hidden stairs and they have no correlation to one another.
The bench sits low, slates cracking, mossed with going unused, built to hold hobbies that stopped coming. Sturdy, its legs are still square. The boards feel level. It screams in a place no one can hear, I am ready — but nothing has come this climb in years, since the humans who built it decided it just wasn’t worth the climb anymore. Growing green, it faces the water, almost thinking to itself. It cannot flinch, it cannot look away. It just stands, slowly morphing to the grass, in the correct position, patient, as furniture is meant to be made, which is to say, not patient at all, when your purpose is that of sitting and lay. Now it’s just a reminder of waiting, hopeful that meaning will come its way.
Beside him, the tree — it does not wait. The tree remembers. A trunk splits in torture, mimicking the inside of a broken mind, done and torn intentionally, a wound grown out and spread to show the world. Bark stacked, showing years, water lines from drowning floods, the same waters the bench is too low to have escaped. The tree has watched the creek rise into his roots, destroying his ancestors’ deep veins, just to chaotically pull back down to almost nothing, so much longer than the bench has existed. The tree doesn’t sit through weather. It becomes part of it. Every ring inside it is a year of choice, not waiting, standing exactly where, as a seedling, his roots said first.
So this is the top of these stairs, in the same space: one thing that gave up gracefully, built and made, but useless, because it will never become purpose again, and the other, a thing that had not a choice to leave, just endures and grows and shows the world its scars, turning itself into something of divine devotion.
I stood between a bench that quit, slowly molding into the surrounds, and a tree whose growth and beauty never stops, never quits. I don’t know which one I climbed up here to be.
— From the forthcoming chapbook Then I Woke Up, Other poems can be found in the past post here.
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