Lime Tree in Michigan

Wendy Booydegraaff | Poetry

January snow falls wet onto grass still green. I’ ve always

wanted to live in a warmer climate. Michigan’s

fate is semi-tropical in thirty, forty years. The lime

tree spindles in my kitchen, its leaves are gone, and one

juicy lime hangs from a flexible branch. The ball

drops lower, lower. Once I pluck it, will it be the end?

White mold creeps up the half-inch trunk. Just a stem,

really. I spray the speckles with soapy water laced with

cayenne. These purple hours of in between—it could go

either way. Night or day? Life or death? Warm or cold?

I pull sleep like threads from an old sweater. Out

side the dark sparkles with cold flakes

and I breathe in the front yard’s maple promise

which I take to mean I have a future though the

trees only watch out for themselves. And can you

blame them? Come spring, the chainsaws march

up and down the streets, replace branches with

air and hundred-year trunks with grass.

Art credit: "A Winter Landscape Within a Jugenstil Border" (1902) by Hermann Hirzel via the National Gallery of ARt