Ghost Sycamore
       

The winter I knew you weren't coming back,
I ran down the hill from the house, the path

through the woods turning red and gold with death
— dank leaves underfoot; branches twined overhead —

and, breathless, stopped where the lake begins,
having glimpsed, through the tangled mist, a glint

of something glimmering, silvery, bright —
I stepped from the shadows toward that shine

and suddenly, there, in the sky at my feet
on the lake's surface, shimmering, a tree —

or the ghost of a white tree, lightning-limbed,
that seemed to have risen up from within

the body of water, the body of sky —
and again, on the far shore, the other side,

the same tree — spectral, luminous —
bowed as in grief at the water's edge I

where it stood among lush pines, bone-white, stark
— stripped of leaves, of rough outer bark —

old sycamore, old boundary-marker —father,
as I saw you in a dream, once, self and other

self, in this world and the next, as if a veil
between them lifted, then everything went still.

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Copyright © 2015 Cecilia Woloch All rights reserved
from Earth
Two Sylvias Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission