Patrick Carrington

Finding The Sound of Oak

I used to climb my father, hands
in the calloused bark of his
as I walked up his chest
and stood on his shoulders. When
I grew he took me to a white oak
he’d planted in the woods. I
climbed that too. All the way
to the crown. It was solid like him.

And sometimes
in summer storms
and sometimes
in branches bent by snow
I’d imagine I could feel him
touch me and hear him call me,
as if he’d evolved into that tree
to lay hands on my shoulders
and say one last thing.
But more often love
was a matter of silence.

The dead come back. Do they
ever leave at all? Maybe
it’s a trick, slipping into dirt
like a root. No matter if
he’s resting now or hiding,
it was easy to forget

the tree. Shameful
it took me so long to know
it deserved better,
that in a truer world
it would not have blurred
into the others
as if it were just the same. I

lost it long ago to the ax
of my neglect, like the pictures
of a man I passed from frame
to scrapbook to shoebox
and locked in a closet

like a skeleton. I return
to these woods with no tongue
and barefoot. To walk quietly,
listening for his risen bones.

“Finding the Sound of Oak” first appeared in Aries.

Companion Piece

For me, poetry alternates between a health and a sickness, a curiosity and a defiance, sustenance and addiction. I write it to drain infection. I write it because someone told me not to once. I write it because it adds enough helium to my head to get my chin off the floor. I wrote my first poem after I saw an old man lie down on the sidewalk and cry one day. I am still trying to figure out if I’m him, or he’s me, or we’re you. I wrote “Finding the Sound of Oak” in a feeble attempt to atone for a multitude of minor sins, hoping to whittle down my purgatory time a bit. And mostly, I wrote it to say, I’m Sorry.