Naming the Trees

Naming the Trees

What Laertes seeded in his sorrow

was—Homer makes exceedingly 

clear—an orchard: ten apple and thirteen 

pear, forty fig, some fifty vine 

of grape. What I have planted in mine 

does not deserve the term, the way 

I balk when someone with a few laying birds

talks about life on the farm. Still, 

no one knew the wanderer—much less 

the wanderer himself—for his fidelity 

with words, but for how at his unlikely return 

he walked the windfall, calling 

each tree by name until his own 

blossomed forth from Ithaka’s rocky soil.  

So I suppose, orchard or no, 

here I am, Father: Gala, Fuji, Bartlett Pear, 

Poplar, Elm, Maple, Willowing Oak. 

Take these windblown limbs; re-member me.