“…who left the way a dream leaves once you open your eyes.”   
      -Jennifer Martelli, “The Memory Floor,” from Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree

I remember before Duke Energy cut down the mulberry,
one main branch broke off in a storm. Lying in the ivy
until the following spring, leaves budded, unfurled,
and green berries appeared, waiting to ripen
on the severed limb, like a ghost memory…

a London friend told me in 2023 two men, shielded
by the wind of Storm Agnes, wielded a chainsaw
to fell the one-hundred-year-old Sycamore
in Northumberland “just for fun.” Said it reminded her
of the story I once shared about the swan, Faye

at the Manlius Swan Pond, the mute mother
stolen—cooked and eaten—her four cygnets
mercifully returned to fend behind the chain link
fence. Motherless. Yet another friend doubted
a vision she’d seen of a strange woman crossing
at the foot of her bed. Wonders

if it was a dream. The Major Oak in Sherwood
Forest died this year. One thousand years old.
Props and metal chains, concrete and lead—
like overkneaded bread, dead from excess
touch, compacted soil from too many tourists,
perhaps too much heat in our changing world.

On the phone, my mother repeats how she won’t
be here for the next wedding in July. Wishful,
she rocks on the front porch, laments the number
of cars whizzing by on East Genessee in one
breath, and in the next, how her daughter and son
got so sick. And here, she lives on, ninety-nine.