~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Kendall Dunkelberg

The Stump

We want to believe this tree will live forever, but now

that the storm has broached the subject, I have to imagine

a life without its thick, rough bark, without its solid trunk.

A life where its branches are an absence above the roof,

where its shadow is a memory like the sound of dry leaves

on a dry lawn, a time where its tiny helicopter seeds

no longer swirl down from on high every spring.

What will we do when this physical presence no longer

outlives us? What will we do when there is nothing left

but loss, when in place of maple there is only stump.

Will we be here in time to sit and delve into its history,

to examine its many rings, its periods of drought and rain.

Will we count back to find the year my sister was born

or the day my father moved back from Omaha to Iowa.

Will we search for the year my German ancestors

first set foot on the fertile farmland at Deep River or

further back to when this tree was small in a forest, no

fields of corn, no plows or dairy herds. Or will the center

be one dark mass of unknowable time, the rings either

so close on one another like lovers huddling in the cold

or fused or rotted from advanced age and forgetting.

Moon Dog

I can imagine a stump, the remains of the tree

under which I was raised, but can I picture it gone?

What of the night I return in winter to nothing?

No stump, no sign of the tree my parents chose

to build a home beside. No grave except a bare

patch of lawn and a wide expanse of sky.

What of the night when I stand in that yard,

looking for a Pole Star as my guide, and all I see

is an icy crystal ring around a pale, fickle moon.

Yes, the two maples my parents planted

on either side of the driveway will still be there;

young saplings now grown to sentinels

like my brother and I, not giants like the big maple,

but survivors, ready to claim their place,

their branches glistening with frost in moon glow.

Maybe come spring we will plant another

young maple to mark this one's passing. Maybe

it will be the start of a new generation,

but now on this clearest, darkest night

there is only a moon dog of grief, where once

we climbed rough branches to the stars.

Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women and is editor of Poetry South. His fourth poetry collection, "Tree Fall with Birdsong," will be published by Fernwood Press in May 2025, and he has poems forthcoming in The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II and Southern Voices: The Power of Place.