Bethany Rohde

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Is That Your Body Blocking the Light?

Across this lawn,

blacktop of shadow
cast between us.

Darkness you did not intend.

How can you, Oak Tree of seventy,
be obscurity and beacon, both?

Through leaves,
I hear whispers growing fainter,
Sh- sh- sh, until we share

each other’s air again.

What's Buried and What's Not

I’m balancing on the curvature
of roots mossed over in unreal green.

They carry a familiar bone structure:
these rough-skinned, working hands

That even now nourish tree flesh
in the bluing dark of Monday.

I trace one root, it skims grass-shallows
and delves below my sight--
                           to extract its choice elixir:

It sips chilled rain from saturated earth,
leaving mineral tang on the forest’s breath.

Even what goes underground can sift,
can lift, can weave the elements–

into next spring’s leaf-fabric.

Bethany Rohde's profile

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Over the Crowd

The slow work of defrost now fans across 
my breath-covered windshield. 
I force my hands deeper down 
into their pockets. Fingertips jam 
against the receipt-scraps of my evening.

I catch some movement through the glass: a girl,
half the height of a Christmas tree.
She's crawling up into a window display
that's advertising: Buy 
one get one free.

Her face is fixed on a tidy pyramid of ornaments.
They almost match her earmuffs 
of candy apple red. 
She's hanging the globes, shoulder to shoulder, on one 
brow-level branch.

With her back to the ever-scrolling crowd 
(which does not see her either) 
she dots the flocked tree with color. 
I leave my car in park.
She's making room for the last of the baubles, 

while occasionally sweeping their price tags
just out of her eyes.


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