Emily as where the blue dips into the black and rises into the blue again
I have seen the maple
fall to test the trust of the earth
& I have seen Emily try
to catch that hundred
& twenty year old tree
with her bare hands. She
broke her arm. She gathered
the river to bury the tree.
She asked me to say a few words
about the degrees of survival,
but all I could do
was talk about her belief
that I am not that maple tree.
All I could do was walk into
the river to stand on top
of the tree that had fallen. This
was a disaster
& Emily made it
so I could walk on water.
***
Darren C. Demaree’s poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including Diode, Meridian, and the Colorado Review. He is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Two Towns Over (March 2018), which was selected as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award by Trio House Press. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry.
