A Catalpa Tree in Munger Place
Vincent Hostak
July 14, 2024
Arborists hate the smell of its fresh cut limbs
but the shade from its broad leaves
have no peer on August afternoons.
Memory clouds how much of this is reason,
and how much is sorcery or miracle, when
the shape of the absent limbs is greater than if all were gone.
There was nothing greener on a Summer’s night.
Its seed pods dangled like sad cigars or
wiry fingers stretching to touch their shadows.
Its dark grey twin looks back, admires
all the fine detail shared in amber streetlight.
We prayed for sheets of rain. Yearned for ruckus, caught merely a whisper.
From April to May, it sported elephant ears
ringed with paper thin garlands,
tiny, white and scarcely speckled orchids.
In June they fell on crabgrass, painted the curb,
circled the storm drains, insinuated snowfall.
We put them in a bowl of water, made a stylish floating world.
We strolled on nights soulless and silent
but for engines growling on Greenville.
Autumn took every shortcut across our big state.
The catalpa’s leaves were gone in hours.
When the old scents returned, you said
you could smell a norther circling Oklahoma.
After the storm, bone collectors lined the street.
They came with ropes and rented wagons,
they left with their ladders and half our tree.
They sped away with fenders sagging,
drew sparks on frosted asphalt,
fishtailed their way to another scheduled surgery.
That Winter the space heater failed,
the toilet and the fishbowl froze.
Our Goldie, later Lazarus, circled for hours
inside an air-pocket under surface ice,
bobbing about, popping its wee fish mouth,
inhaling the last food flakes to January’s howling saws.
Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.
