“People forget their spirits easily suffocate so they must keep them far up in tree branches where they can be summoned any moment.  It’s better if you’re outside as it’s hard for spirits to get into houses or buildings or airplanes.  The spirit above anything else is attracted to humility.  If I slept in the streets it would be under the cardboard with me.”

            -from the poem “Spirit” by Jim Harrison

SPRING MEMORY 

It was raining as a male mockingbird sang like Pavarotti from a crabapple tree across the creek.  The tree was as stunning as the birdsong, a brilliant ball of pink-red fire.  I’ve never heard such a loud bird except at the zoo.  Birds sing loudly in spring because they are hungry, but also because they are lonesome, restless and lustful, especially the males.  Perhaps this explains my constant singing from the back patio.     

There is also a peach tree on the creekbank with blossoms the color of a woman’s pink painted lips.  I pruned the tree in early spring so it bled sap.  I put a bead of it on my tongue to see if it tasted like peaches, but it just tasted like sap. 

It reminds me of a peach tree in Afghanistan that was inside a garden with high pocked concrete walls.  Like the country it was deeply wounded, its trunk split by shrapnel from a Taliban rocket.  The rocket scared off the garden’s Afghan caretaker, so I took care of it with two friends.  By late summer the beleaguered tree produced exactly three peaches for the three of us.  We relished them as the tiny miracles we knew they were.      

Crabapple Tree

Shawnee, Oklahoma