Doug Ramspeck
	Tupelos   What trance they must have fallen               into.  The ovoid blue-black fruit dangling as a strange sadness                in the dusk light.  The gray bark furrowed into alligator hide.               The leaves dreaming like fence slats as the wind goes rushing through them,               like moths transfixed and bumping at the porch light, as though it is possible               for photons to coalesce and know each other as the sum of their amplitudes,               in the intimacy of their quantum physics, like water flowing into water across               the broken rocks of the river beyond the trees.   They are long married, our tupelos,               which we can tell by the way the names sound against the tongue—blackgum, pepperidge,               beetlebung, sourgum.  And by the way the elliptical leaves lean all in one direction—               at the same time as the trunks turn subtly away from one another, as though               they have grown so far from the soil they can’t go back.  As though they have pledged               themselves only to the tallest canopy of leaves, which take the long view,               which rise even higher than our house and follow the river until it disappears               beyond the ridge.   Or maybe not sadness but a weathered               isolation, the pith chambered as partitions, the decaying holes where the small animals               hide, the outstretched limbs where once we saw the starlings alight               in their green glossy multitudes, the branches bending beneath the weight of the abundance.