Hollow Years
What carves away the insides? Here, inside the apple tree, each trunk is
rotted out, hollowed through. The emptiness kept growing when we
weren’t looking. Now everything hangs on a shell of bark.
Though somehow the tree seems to carry on, keeps blooming each
spring, weighing down these worn branches with fruit. I kneel to get a
closer look, and see the space inside is dark, and shadowed like a cave.
The wood is marbled, gnarled and dry, splintered into fragments that
look like teeth and let through the light. Troughs and channels, tiny
pinholes and cracks inside the bark tell the story of slow passage to
decay. Shards of wood have dried to white or grey, giving the
appearance of splinters snapped and broken along the base.
But in the third, still growing, just inside the opening, two roots at thick
as my wrists cling along the back, snaking upwards from a fibrous tangle
just above the dark soil.
If you follow it with your eye, it rises into a low branch a child could swing upon
Miranda Lynn Barnes is a poet from the US, now living in the UK. Recent poems appear in The Compass, The Interpreter’s House, and Confingo. Miranda teaches at Bath Spa University, where she earned her PhD. Website: https://mirandalynnbarnes.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @LuminousJune