Apple Tree

[Elsie Fillmore]

One million years,
spat and chewed and spat by sun cycles.
Charcoal branches
bear no fruit, only
echoes.

Petrified bole,
serpents twisting through pale air.
Heartwood, and grit,
adorned with rope tied talons, and
black feathery masses.

Pheasants hung like,
Salem heretics.
Aging game left uneaten,
cast toward roots and
eternal ashes, but

the peacock,
like the lotus flower floating on murky water,
rest above the soot soiled tree,
and above his avian sisters, floating as
a white dandolian seed
free from its dead stalk.

On my first read through of the poem, I dismissed its dense earthy images, and didnt want to invest in a close read, but it definitely improves with analysis. Like I said, it starts out pretty bleak, if there were a way to introduce the concept of rebirth and redemption a little earlier in the poem. The first three stanzas are mostly one note. Once a reader is invested, the peacock image becomes quite powerful in juxtaposition to the tree.