by Mark Fischweicher
I walk to the market
two blocks away
for some salad, a spring mix
from Salinas,
in southern California
chock full of Oak Leaf Chard,
Baby Butter Kale,
Green Leaf Mizuna, Red Leaf Arugula
and Rosa Radicchio
crabapple blossoms
litter the road where I walk
making the
pavement pink
the sidewalk’s pushed up
by the roots of the tree
spreading beneath them
with splotches of weeds
coming up in the cracks
and in no time at all
the pink paved road
returns
to its constant,
its black, brown and gray
I say, perhaps
the Street Sweeper
swept by spinning its brooms
sweeping away the blossoms
with all the other urban rubbish
and debris,
blossoms not withstanding
we move on
under the rootless
scaffolding, our city’s official tree
the fruitless
sidewalk sheds
we walk under, more than
three hundred miles of them
stretched above us
one which still stands
after it was first apparently planted
twenty-eight years ago
while the “actual” blossoms
herald their buds and
no late frost has of yet
decimated the chance
of apples or even peaches
and berries upstate,
in the summer,
already in bud
as is our Tulip tree
the one we bought 35 years ago
just six inches high, having grown to around
60 feet tall by now,
the same as New York’s oldest,
the Alley Pond Giant, a sapling when
the Dutch arrived, thought to be
as much as 450 years old,
likely the oldest living thing in New York,
it sits in a sunken grove
within earshot of
the Cross Island Parkway and the L.I.E,
the top of the tree
visible to cars and trucks
travelling west
a green planet here,
where I rest
Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.