History is Not a Great Tree by Fleda Brown

History is not a great tree. It’s more
like a bush, I think, or maybe
a sponge, soaking up and periodically
wringing out. Wow, a tree would mean
you could get to the top, to the upper
branches that would weave
from your weight! It would be broad
from there, and still. You could see
dis-ease roll across like wind over wheat.
The way you see a tenement
from the wide glass of your penthouse.
You could imagine yourself down there,
sleeping in your unwashed clothes,
breathing the factory fumes,
eating what’s available at Seven Eleven.
You could almost imagine
dying just from living. Growing fatter
in the process. No wonder the germs
love people, no wonder the germs
are joining hands as if they were
playing Red Rover. History would be
branching and tangling and translating
down there. It would be growing
improbable and efficient. It might come
by air. It could show up either as
the time-that-was, or as the beginning:
an annunciation, a trumpet you didn’t
know you heard, until you did.

Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Brief, won the Hollis Summers Prize and will be published by the University of Ohio Press in 2021. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her memoirs include Driving With Dvorak, published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was the poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan.