Why I Pray To Trees
1
Fuck you, cancer.
That's how you begin
a poem about cancer.
2
But this is not a poem about cancer.
3
Dear America, tell me.
What can you do when
challenged but eat the whole
ghost pepper and then also
the 72-ounce flank steak?
And gain infamy for
your obstinacy?
4
But America,
have you ever
been the mere
shadow of a
wren?
5
Tell me, are you
an ambassador to
reason? Or a flog
in the hands of
ignorance? Or a
two-for-one Philly
Cheesesteak with
curly fries? Or the
tears of the saddest
glacier on earth?
6
America, I dreamed
a golden finger
reached down
from its cloud
and blessed us
with a grace
of sense.
7
Upon waking, one
might ask oneself,
is the emptiness
of a day already
hammering its pins
into the disquiet
of my bones?
8
The wages of
dying is love,
said Galway
Kinnell.
9
America, don't look:
There's a silver eagle
afloat on the lake of
the mind. And a Cau-
casian heterosexual
male in the cover of the
reeds, popping shells
into a twelve gauge.
10
What has empathy
ever done for me?
And whose unscheduled
raincloud is this, saddening
our Superbowl Sunday?
11
Suddenly, we
find ourselves with
a currency of
crows.
And all the forgotten
teakettles of Pittsburg
cry out as one.
12
The other day
my daughter said,
speaking to her
toy horse,
'I hereby pronounce
you Pinochet, queen
of unicorns and
unbridled fascism.'
13
Last year I had cancer.
It didn't kill me. And neither
did my abandonment at
age three. Nor a childhood
of sanctioned violence.
So, whatever it is you've got.
Bring it on, motherfucker.
14
Am I equal to a star?
15
Or am I a humanish
stipple of clicks and
instantaneous funds
transfers?
16
Poetry is not a luxury,
said Audre Lorde.
17
I shall touch the hem of death and smile.
I shall be the brazen harbinger of nothing.
18
A year ago today
they cut the tumor
out. It was deep
snow season.
A season
by which
one reconciles
one's living.
19
Most people
aren't empty as
scarecrows,
are they?
20
America, listen.
What doesn't kill you
year by year makes
you hungrier for a
beauty you don't
deserve.
21
Tell me,
what's in your
heart? And don't
say poetry. And
don't say a flight
of cranes rising
against a February
afternoon's deep
honeylight. And
don't say blood.
22
To face cancer is
to become a bison.
A bison who turns
into the brunt of a
winter storm.
Sometimes you are
indecipherable from
the onslaught of
wind and ice.
But there is one
way through this.
And you are it.
23
It's a fearful thing, to love
what death can touch,
said Judah Halevi.
24
America, what do you think?
I think we'll wake up one day
in a spring meadow where the
balance of our transgressions
will be licked by the sun and
we'll each be handed a
plaque that says,
You Are, At Long
Last, Enough.
25
Is it a wisp of lost prayer?
Or a flock of witless moths
tumbling downwind toward
a destiny of wet paint?
26
Or the polished
collarbone of a hare?
Or an agate encasing
a seahorse fossil
you've carried in a
pocket half your life
to hold up against
this one bloodred
Oregon sun?
Or an MQ-9 Reaper
drone cocked and
locked over Haiti?
27
I'd like to get away from the earth awhile
and then come back to it and begin over,
said Robert Frost.
28
Listen.
Dying of cancer
is not the province
of this poem.
29
But America, shall we
fight one another like
wolves? And whoever's
still standing, shall they
lead us into the next
darkness?
30
Am I too weary to
change the world?
31
Sometimes, doesn't humanity simply elude us?
32
But O how confident
we are in the predictable
order of our primacy.
33
This morning—black screws in the veneer of my heart.
34
America,
don't believe
in yourself.
35
America,
believe in
yourself.
36
Hello.
I'd like to tell you.
I've nearly reached
my remission date.
By which cancer
becomes a memory.
By which no next
moment is guaranteed,
only touched with
gratitude.
37
And the poem is
about cancer,
after all.
38
I have graduated from
the university of oblivion,
said Tomas
Tranströmer.
39
O, the brevity of
stars is laughable.
Andrew Robin is the author of three collections of poetry and a handful of chapbooks. Recognitions include the Iowa Poetry Prize, a Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship, and a Distinguished Teaching Award in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He lives with his wife Sarah north of Seattle on Sx’wálech (Lopez Island) in the unceded ancestral waterways of the Coast Salish peoples, where he works as a registered nurse.