In the Orchard
Justin Runge
15
the world’s mottled mud
sopped she walks toward
reckon the hillock blotch
is a leg poorly shaved
dull cold noon-sized
his foot presses to this
there is so much math
in an oak tree too much
of the toothsome dark-
browed girls I’d freeze for
in this walking away
if the snow is untouched
give it time if the departure
is dying feed it wet wood
and smell of it I can tell
why I care for her only she
casts and is cast in shadow
sways green is in egress
how right to keep a leave-
taking or two treat them
like leaves drop them
on the floor and walk
16
she is soldier courier
conifer cotton a snow
drift cuts across polygonal
a little of her boot snarl
of dendriform downhill
a cigar tooth-ripped and lit
then stamped out is the tree
she leans against
she could be waiting for
something horse-drawn
or watching domestic smoke
rise from her miles-off home
papal white with decision
it says we have started
without you her squint
and cinch now seem restive
he claims I’ll take weeks
though this is her chronicle
her purse of once-warm
bread her deleted limbs
17
genealogy is the study
of versioning he sketches
what he sees stenographies
of sisters or of selves
dematerializing denuded
into a canted upslope I call
this three women ascending
a hill then becoming it
no branches just branching
triplicating her into lineage
he’s collecting editions
of turning away I’ll throw
them in the backroom
he says never look at them
18
add the trees complete
them from what is nothing
but the lead rubbed against
a memorial wall her lean
the first seconds of a fall
back it is brutally cold
where I am so her hands
go into her pockets and he
says fine the lining
rises like plume for a mate
his pencil touches center
page and the rest
of her radiates hands
are hardest the only parts
of us that interlace where
bones are most evidently
there a button for closure
my horseless cossack
19
something sculptural gnarls
near her she’s caught
walking into a gray wave
is it north is this leaving
shallow focus like a refusal
to see the places she lives
besides these she leans
the incline like wind maybe
he’s building a community
of her to live among
the communion seeped
into the subconscious I see
without her face he bathed
every torque and torsion
of a tree with attention alive
but unleaving fruitless
orchard light leaves too
generosity is drawing her
an exit I remember the loft
where they found hundreds
of her they called it treasure
not trafficking
Justin Runge is the author of Plainsight (New Michigan Press, 2012) and Hum Decode (Greying Ghost Press, 2014). His criticism has been featured by Black Warrior Review and Pleiades, and his poetry has been published in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, DIAGRAM, Colorado Review, and other journals.