Catherine Bowman

I loved this tree. South of San Antonio, west of the heart, growing in the ravines of the Pecos River inside me, down across the Rio Grande and up into the Llano’s staked plains, tree of memory, tree of ghosts, tree of rain— under birdsong whispers you cradled me in your canopy. When I was a baby, I stroked the soft hair on your leaves. You were my first true church, and when rains came our whole bodies shook and shimmered with God’s words. You let me bury all my secrets in your dirt and sleep in your altar as we drifted through stars. Forgive me, Tree, for humiliating you. I kicked at your bark. Spit on you. Tree, I cut you and carved cruel words on you in reverse in my rough, crooked cursive, with a rusted green knife I stole from a bitch, scarring your sacred skin. I burned you with a lighter shaped like a cowboy boot, left bird dogs tied to you for days on end, let drill sergeants in training from the nearby base lash out and practice on you. I let belly-gods, plug-ugly bruisers, devouring cowboys and butchers stuff themselves into me, hog-tie me whole and slap me around as you watched. When I laughed and made animal sounds, I scared you. I chewed you out. Made fun of you. I used toxins and poisons to make you immaculate. I wanted you perfect. I nailed a no-trespassing sign and a big security light to your side. I sold pieces of you off. I abandoned you. I abandoned myself. All around us the underground world overflows with love. Season after season you return, sap rising up from your roots, unfinished, always becoming. I defended against love for as long as I could until I couldn’t. You no longer have to hide your self in your deepest self. You no longer need the ones you thought you most needed. I know I am not good at this, or anything really, but I’m trying. Roll on, roll on, roll on— Tonight, I’m wearing a red dress, under a man’s honeyed mouths and tent. Your red flowers open and crown and cover us in a Sunday of pollens. And when I press my ear to your thickness, to your heart, I hear: bells, bells, bells.

An hour inland from Bangor, Maine, over rolling hills, in an oval pasture surrounded by giant conifers, the forest floor bejeweled with ruby-studded mushrooms, I watch the sheep sing, if bleating could be called a song. Maybe someone in a grove long ago saw a man attached to a beast of burden and so the concept of the satyr was born. Memory is the past reversed. I once went out with a sailor, a Spaniard, from Andalucía. We met at sea where I worked the roulette wheel in the ship’s casino. His legs were slightly bowed, his voice gruff and torn, and when he came the sound seemed to climb up not from his throat but from his feet smelling of earth and sea and grief— a deep song Lorca called duende. It wasn’t pretty. His blue and red and purple briefs soaking in a bucket by the cabin door. He told me once when he was a boy his grandmother had caught him trying to fuck a chicken.The poor chicken, he laughed, his saddle-worn Andalucían laugh, feathers flying everywhere, his grandmother screaming. And what to call those half-human, half-chicken kinds of days: scratching and clawing at the earth, bathed in dust, trying not to think about the simmering anise, peppercorn, and broth. When I visited him, he met me at the airport. Then the long train ride south through field after field of sunflowers.Por la tarde families paraded,por la noche, only men and boys and extranjeras—foreign women— out past sunset. In an empty disco six or seven guys danced, throwing themselves around madly, slamming into each other to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Franco had died a few years back. From my window that night, a full moon, shadows of the town square, the boarded-up cathedral, a cat in heat, the smell of blood oranges. In the morning his grandmother, all in black, asleep stooped in a chair outside my door. Nearby the ruins of an ancient Roman temple, goats on hind legs eating the pale green leaves from olive trees.