The Water Oak
Jesse Doiron
September 8, 2024
Spring
A great load of green
growing over the garden
over the grass
unhidden and bidden
burgeoning forth
breaking through
the blue of an
unburdened sky.
Summer
The shade. The shade. The shade.
It seems ice cold – the shade.
The lizards and the cat
doze deeply in the shade.
Ivy crochets lazily.
The birds, bewildering
to rest, hide in the shade.
They leave the bugs alone.
The cat leaves them alone.
The ivy knits along
the longest lines of shade,
where beetles drowse away,
and I sit idly by
beneath the shade, the shade.
Autumn
Rouged and bejeweled, she lets her auburn
hair fall lightly down in a yellow light.
She is alluringly demure, as if
embarrassed to remove her clothes, as if
unsure of what her nakedness might mean.
She twirls her skirt this way and that as she
unbuttons, knowing I will look for more.
She loosens more, unbelts her garters, and
unties, undoes, unblouses, then, slightly
bends to let what’s left slip down her spine.
She shyly shows her limbs, her trunk, her smile
as I admire her all the while – and
gather up what she has scattered on the floor.
Winter
Last winter hurt the tree.
I saw it shivering
the week it rained and rained,
until the ice pulled down
a dozen leafless limbs –
big ones – with jagged ends
that left her trunk in thorns.
She shed half of her weight
back then, and all around
her roots were broken dreams.
Jesse Doiron has worked in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia as an educator and consultant. His teaching experience ranges from English for international business at the UC – Berkeley Extension in San Francisco to creative writing at the Mark Stiles Maximum Security Prison for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
