Weeping Woman

Called widow makers because their branches fall
during droughts. They sever their own branches to

conserve water, to save the whole tree. As if cutting
off a hand to save a whole body. How does the tree

decide what to drop? This one dropped two limbs,
one onto a car. It only took the men a day to

remove the branches. One singular trunk left. It stood
in the night, in the light of the moon like a general, in

disbelief, watching on a last hill, bodies everywhere.
The way the ground shook when the branches hit

the cement. The thick sound of ambition. Once in
Yosemite, a black oak limb killed two boys.

I remember the mother from school, before children,
before the hardest-to-see stars came down.

That day, even the clouds got coffins. They took the
shape of all the cities they had travelled over. I have

imagined the sound the black oak made as it fell to
the floor so many times, that it’s become silence.

How the mothers must have risen an inch off the
ground. How in tragedy, shape matters. How the

mothers’ faces broke into small rectangles and
triangles. How sadness isn’t just in the eyes, but also

in the hands. How her hands soldered into her cheek.
How in tragedy, we touch our own faces first.