An American Story - Lisa Shulman

[Lawrence Robinson]

An American Story 

There was an apple tree in our town,
thick-trunked and sturdy limbed,
we used to play beneath its green shade,
climb up into its clouds
of rain-scented blossoms.
Even though its glossy red apples
were too tart for our taste
we all thought it a perfect tree.

But as the years passed
the tree gradually leaned to the east
as if seeking something it lacked—
sun or space or mineral.
Its branches became brittle
scabby sores and lumps appeared on its trunk
and its apples, once simply sour,
grew misshapen as knuckles
wormy and bitter.

Last spring when only a scattering
of tattered blossoms clung to its branches,
a wild windstorm blew through the town
snapping the trunk as if it were nothing
more than a child’s thin fingers,
and we saw then the inner spaces—
once flowing with rivulets of sap 
and strong with heartwood
now soft and empty, hollow with rot.

Some of us would have let the tree fall, turning
through summers and winters back into soil,
while we planted and tended 
new trees—peach and plum and even apple.
But there were those who refused to see
that diseased inner wood, who bound
and staked and fed the old tree, 
praised its past glory, and blind still 
swallowed its bitter fruit.

	- Lisa Shulman
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