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Marty Campbell
i just searched 4 hours for a pome i'd remembered posting in here somewhere early on maybe 2013, but it appears to be gone in here now. i'd like it to be in here to all my classmates who started our earliest lives in Evanston among endless elegant elder elms. i wrote this in 2003 living at the time in the Santa Cruz Mts., CA., at 955 Ormsby Trail, Watsonville CA 95076, quite shortly after my brother and i sold the house we'd moved into 50 years prior, in our mother's wake:
twigs, paper, time
he will hold. the two columns of columns of elm which walk him all nine blocks (of Orrington Avenue) to (Orrington) School and home again arching to form the long cathedral ceiling which offers or wants no where else to go. she is the sky. her lines curved grace--the only species that could instruct his pencil so:
start to the roots follow up the trunk, bend out gracefully any ole way--no sharp turns ever!--out, bend a nother way, out, out to the tip of one twig; then, back to the roots and out the same way again; and again, and again.
(Ms. Wieboldt gives him an A.)
in summer, as school approaches his birthday, if you paint in leaves everywhere they go, you lose the lines, and it is as if you’d left yellow out of green. in winter again, at night, when he is old enough to be going nowhere, she steals stars and gives them back again. and day. the barked columns that form the walls and rafter this roof are the same gray. gray of the sky, gray of the snow, dirty before ground, gray of the campus buildings. graying, now, of his head of hair.
even though the house’s sale closed last thursday.
even though Evanston’s lengthy costly battle against Dutch elm disease is not won like those of the nation.
even among these pines and live oaks here.
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