I knew the seasons by its changes

the squirrels the crows the seagulls.

Spring came and it opened its knots

in precipitate and fleshy flowers

of tactile elongated fullness

that tapped upon the window pane.

It bore no fruit my chestnut tree

and factually it wasn’t even mine

or only mine because we’d eyed each other

every morning for over thirty years.

But it bore flowers and squirrels and seagulls

summer autumn crows spring

ignoring the biological accounting

of transmissible fertility.

It bore flowers as if bearing poems

and didn’t need to write them down

like lovers loving in a single body

not knowing where one ends and the other begins

wide open in vaginal lips

with uterine long phallic flowers.

This year again it flowered on time.

But winter came in flowering May.

They said the root had split in two

the trunk was hollow at the heart

they couldn’t understand how it bore flowers.

They cut my tree down branch by branch

leaving only the root and its emptiness

and on the ground below

the hot snow of its puzzled

impossible

flowers.