Jeffrey

Everything is beautiful in the summer
Except a Jeffrey Pine.
Unfettered and shaggy,
He reaches towards the sky.
Trying to be light and frivolous
But failing.
Only the squirrels and bluejays
Manage to play and mock
The Pine standing stoic.

When the snow comes
The pine is triumphant.
Plastered with snow,
The boughs pull down,
Branches winched in
Like an umbrella.

The Jeffrey is beautiful in the winter,
At his most glorious assaulted
By snow and wind.
Here he is not stoic
But vigilant and brave.
Beneath the snow, the Jeffrey waits
For summer to reach
His shaggy branches upwards.
The same tree, but so different.
Turned inside out. Always
waiting for the next season to take
An opposite form.

Wholly Me

Language enthralls me. Certain phrases that I tell people in my day to day life swirl across the soft palate of my mind. "I am separated." That sounds so harsh. Separated. Split. Divided. Fragmented. Torn asunder. The images are brutal. Because, of course, I am not separated; I am whole. Leaving my husband was the first time I was wholly me. For twenty some odd years I lived like a host. Marriage for me was more of an inane parasitic relationship. I was the nurse shark to my husband's pilot fish. Always there, he survived off the flotsam that surrounded me. I swam and swam taking his presence for granted. When I left (because the pilot fish had turned into a problem), I worried about how the pilot fish would survive. Are there pilot fish without sharks? But I was on my own for the first time. Separated? Not exactly. Whole but apart. Who knew that the shark gets as attached as the pilot fish?

Now I tell people: "We are reconciling." Sounds like we are balancing our checkbook, settling our accounts, aligning our stars. It's surprisingly easy. Natural. Not passionate nor a struggle nor work even. Simple, comfortable, smooth. I thought it would be hard, but the hard part is how easy it is to slip back into our roles. What should our new roles be, though? Our old roles were not good.

However, a pilot fish remains a pilot fish and a shark remains a shark.