To the Careworn Live Oak Trunk Washed Up on Morro Strand

If the world hadn’t called me away — injecting knowledge
and career, I’d be with you now, resting quietly on
your trunk, tranquility rolling over my limbs — a salving
fog — do others feel your emanations or is it all
just ether from my lungs?

In my beach year I sat every evening, embraced by
your second branch from the end — the solid one — me
looking edge-ward where ocean licked sky.

Storms teach us both the necessary and accessory.

Anchored atop a finger bluff — fifteen feet above the
spring tide line — did you insult Neptune only to be flung
up here in gang-banger impetuosity, or
perhaps it was a rogue wave spawned four hundred and twenty seven
miles mid-ocean — regardless, what a view you have — on
mica-thin winter days Hawaii is almost within
my grasp, and I imagine psychedelic fishes,
afternoon breezes tart as just-ripe pineapples, and all the poi
my lank stomach will hold.

I’ve dropped by again — been too long I know, but time
never exceeds the speed limit, and here you are, still
resting on the strand — unaged by both our year together
and the ten years since — perhaps the Appalachian love
ballads I sang you out of loneliness, aided your stability.

Both algebra and full hearts require constants.

Gary D. Grossman

Song of Eretz, Spring 2023