Paisley Rekdal
CREATION STORY
Before the boy was born, he dreamed
- of a child asleep beside a tree, fireflies
- flecking the watery dark.
- He remembers this now, standing
- with his four-year-old before the ancient
- oak outside their house, the tree
- so root-brittle that when the windstorm scoured
- the block’s shaggy lanes of pine and maple,
- its copper trunk split as the tree heaved up,
- taking with it stones and flowerbeds, half
- their tiny yard. Up and down the block,
- trees beached themselves onto cars
- and blacktop, the great roots
- yawed up in knots, trunks like longboats
- run aground. The man has taken his son
- to see them: the giants, his son
- calls them, snapped like matchsticks
- in the wind. Though it wasn’t only wind
- that did this. The fact was humans
- caused a drought, which worsened heat,
- which brought sand storms up the coast, changed
- the very current of the ocean, which means
- hurricanes and even floods now
- at the doorsteps of strangers, like dogs
- flushing a wounded grouse to ground.
- They had done this: it was astonishing
- to the man how passively they’d worked
- such violence, that what they loved,
- desire destroyed. But of course,
- this was beyond the boy, and to tell him now
- would diminish his sense of security.
- For a moment the man considers telling the boy
- about his dream to distract him, the image
- of a child sleeping so sweetly that a tree
- might fall in love with him. But even thinking
- of this image, it starts its change. The tree,
- having fallen in love with the boy, wraps him
- in its roots, the little boy fetal in its embrace, curled
- there in the semblance of sleep, hoping that the tree
- might tire of him and let him go. But the tree
- will not let the boy go. It holds him tight
- and tighter till he cries, until the boy begins
- to beg for his release. But the tree
- only thickens around him, grows
- off its feeding until his hair turns white and fine
- as orchid root, and bog moss fills
- the sockets of his cheeks. The man knows
- he cannot tell his son this story,
- yet he can’t help but imagine it, a boy
- cauled by bark and leaf until one day
- a woodcutter comes into the forest
- to harvest it. And saws
- and hacks at the rotten base, toppling it
- as all the oaks now in their neighborhood
- have toppled—lost, the man tells his son
- who asks, because the neighbors
- forgot to water them—sheared off in a wall
- of mud and root that looms over them:
- the great roots heaved up in a fist with a boy’s
- knotted remnants inside (the man seeing this
- clearly, even as he tries not to see it) like a stone
- entwined in rope perhaps, or the head of an enemy
- raised after battle.
PAISLEY REKDAL is the author, most recently, of Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press).
