The Cottonwood

Back home in Minneapolis we have these giant cottonwood trees in the backyard on the lakeshore. As a child, I used to be deathly afraid of them for a number of reasons, chief among them that every spring they would drop these horrible sticky bud cases that looked like bizarre alien centipedes and would not come off your feet no matter how hard you scrubbed.

Combine that with me going through a stressful semester in college, and you get this (composed August 2003):

Alone along a dusty road
The twilight gently fading grey
The dusty crunch of footsteps stops
Now frozen fast by deep dismay
For overhead now looms an image
Black against the fading grey
The hateful shadow of the branches
That never know the light of day
A brooding shape that hates all good:
The image of a cottonwood.

Black the heartwood, black the sap
Black the wrinkled bark, and black
The burning rage that hates all those
Who dare to tread this dusty road.

The softly swaying, rustling leaves
Still chant a hissing, venemous rhyme
To freeze the blood and bind the soul
Itself to torment for all time.

Now I lay me down to sleep
(though nightmares are become my dreams)
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
(a hopeless cause though it may seem)
And should I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take
And keep it safe from that dread mood:
The malice of the cottonwood.