Walnut Tree
It began to pour outside where the walnut tree grew—the one outside your window. By Helena Pantsis
It began to pour outside where the walnut tree grew—the one outside your window, where I’d been standing long before the weather changed. I stood beneath that tree throwing walnuts at the glass, hoping at some point, you’d find me there and come outside to talk. You wouldn’t return the calls I left, and so I waited against the hard bark of the tree, covered with fissures and rough to the touch, when the rain eventually came and swamped me in.
The mud soured my shoes, and as I stood, still throwing walnuts at your glass, I noticed that your mother had torn out the tulips that grew from the dirt patch in the corner of the yard. The tulips were your favorite, you once told me, though you never did learn how to tend them, thinking they needed nothing at all to grow. I recalled their dying shape, necks snapped in permanent droop and blooms faded to a lifeless shade of plum. I couldn’t stop admiring the new bareness of the earth. The mums had withered; the seeds were hollow. The howl-hum of the wind whirred, and I could hear the sap inside the tree pulsing against the wounds of peeled off bark.
In the summer rain you were the first to touch me, back against a hundred grains of sand. I couldn’t let you go. So I stayed, flesh against coarse wood where the gray grain split, the branches clawing to find their new home in me, and me, burying myself in that tree the way you’d somehow buried yourself in me.
Splinter hunkering down in raw girl skin, moving like flotsam with the current of my veins. But I didn’t care—I’d let a hundred splinters pierce me for a moment more with you, even if you didn’t pluck them out. I watched your window when the rain came, glass wetting to opacity, and the walnut tree becoming me, remembering the thing you said, about growth and change and planting roots. And I was so sorry is what I wanted to say, that I would give you all the space you needed, and I didn’t need an answer now, just something to let me know this was real. I would wait all the world, I wanted to say, but the wood grazed my bones through the soft gums of my mouth down to my cold, sharpened clavicles and I couldn’t speak anymore. Flowers bloomed through my unclogged pores: some dropping catkins, some short and prickly to the touch, all bursting through my chest like the way you cut through me.
I reached up to your window, fingers knotty like redwood, long and thick with trembling veins, rain coating me like an oil spill.
And now I am the tree, and the weather has me as I drop walnuts from my knotted limbs, my flared leaves thrashing at your window with the pull of the wind. You had lovers before, I know, though I’d tried to forget them, and you’ll love anew after me with ease. But now stuck fast to the earth, I can’t help but wonder who the walnut tree is standing next to me.
Helena Pantsis is a writer and artist from Australia. She is the author of the short story collection GLUTT and the forthcoming poetry collection CAPTCHA. hlnpnts.com