Autumn fruit on a Japanese dogwood tree

Smoke Trees and Mountain Ash­­­­

Because I never learned the names of flowering trees,
they all seem ornamental, with tiny hard fruit
that softens with the frost. Then the birds can eat.

Seeds scatter, form new plants bred to please the eye,
not for juice or sweetness. If a vine’s not pruned
it begins to strangle the tree on which it climbs.

My grandma is a flapper, thin, with pale gray eyes,
different from my dark ones. In this tintype, I see her
in a stippled scarf tied around bobbed hair.

She holds an alto sax, never wants children.
Grandpa proposes after only weeks of courting.
She takes him to the porch swing under yellow lights.

The air drips with wisteria. Witch hazels in the distance
and wolf-eye trees nearby stare as she twists his arm,
then closely checks his skin for tell-tale blood lines.

Listen to this poem here:

About This Poem:

• This poem began from a prompt I found in a craft book, Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet. I began writing into the prompt after several failed attempts at poems about my complicated relationship with my grandmother, my father’s mother. I was told I looked like her, that we had similar mannerisms.
• As with many poems I consider successful, this one was a container for a collision of seemingly unrelated things.
• It was originally published in Shot Glass Journal in Fall 2015.