For Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera

One of the first to appear and to be seen here and after fire—the contradiction not missed. You so quick to burn and, too, so quick to recover and flourish as if you called the dire condition home. Here the bare ground still smoking and you persistent and hopeful springing up, letting loose your seeds to another charred scape. Furry new stems of reddish-brown and your leaf sharp toothed—green in spring and yellow in autumn, adding to the season’s tumult of color. Those yellow leaves I picked and pressed in books given away long ago, found by another who twirled them in the hand, maybe knowing something of you and your shallow but hardy roots. In that room with the narrow large windows and the desks in groups of four, we made boxes from your bark—the strips curling, often resisting needle and twine and the shape of confinement, the space for storing things not of the forest floor but rather the plastic bauble or one marble or one charm, the dulled coin. Even now, far from those years, from that May when near the lake I stood and gazed upward at your straight line—still, your smooth inner skin and the one blackened scar.