(Quercus rubra)
Giant one, though the passage
of time has not been kind,
still you cling on.
Your lightning-struck trunk,
rotting on one side, bears
saw marks near your half-gone
crown where birds still alight
on what remains of your branches.
Like obedient pupils
gathered at their teacher’s feet,
the rows of headstones lying
in your shade seem all eyes and ears,
ready to take notes.
Or perhaps it’s the other way around
and the old learners nourishing your roots
are providing instruction themselves,
a lesson about time and how the longer
one spends aboveground
the closer to the earth one gets.
*
Nebo Mountain
What an odd thing it is to cast my gaze
day after day upon a place where
I will never in my lifetime step foot.
Across the river and highway,
the mountain rises out of nothing,
solitary, a disjunct wedge of uplift
packed with rock older than dirt.
Through my kitchen window, I watch
it green up every growing season,
though I long ago gave up notions
of climbing it, too sheer its face
and too near the highway. Kick a rock
and I’m likely to shatter
a motorist’s windshield below.
Besides, there are some places
one shouldn’t go—the knitting circle,
a teenager’s bedroom, the temple’s
inner chamber. Call it exclusion,
but it is instructive to know
how Moses must have felt
and wonder just what secrets
hide behind the green veil.
We wave to one another instead,
the mountain and I, and there’s
contentment in staying right here
to watch curtains of mist
slough by between us as
we exchange curious looks.
Jeremy Lloyd lives in East Tennessee where he teaches on the faculty of Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. His writing has appeared in Sierra, Gray’s Sporting Journal, High Country News, The Sun, Fourth Genre, and North Carolina Literary Review. He received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and co-directs the Tremont Writers Conference.