Deadwood
by Stephen Haven
The branch will not break.
—James Wright
Of course, the branch does break, and the sun,
No drunk Hungarian, stabs the rooftops,
Butterflies the brightest leaves,
Ducks the thought of where we are
Children of full immersion, a dusk sealed
Inside of us. Each sunset, for a season,
From a hot back porch, cooled by glasses
We drafted, we sat beneath the rotting limbs
Some god threw down. One broke a floorboard
In a storm, that other-worldly meteor
Sliced the back-porch railing, caught us
Absent in our seats. Dead to the world
If we hadn’t already been
Passed out in our bed. As if Jehovah
Had no goddess in this fight and speared
A shot across our bow, stalked the millennia
Of our thought until we talked
Of arborists and early deaths, the celebrant
Of a cardinal marooned in its bright life.
Leavened by the pull of earth again,
Halfway up those buskins, we wondered what
They’d bust, the roof? the kitchen? We tithed
Our yearly dues, the sun a Modelo Gold.
We were each twice split, we were severed
Each of us, weighted with qualms we never
Sought or welcomed. We tipped the lip
Of those shared suds, sawed the fallen branch.
Chipped it to dust, swept the floorboards,
Swept the liturgies of the dead,
The living too, all lost limbs.
Up from the folding chairs we unpack
Each spring (they fit so neatly in a bag),
The lift of a mug, of a back-porch knife,
August ballasting this long life.
Stephen Haven's fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was published by Slant Books in 2025. His most recent earlier collection, The Last Sacred Place in North America, was selected by T.R. Hummer for the New American Prize in 2012. His poems have appeared recently in Blackbird, The Common, Vox Populi, Verse Daily, The Montreal Review, Live Encounters, and elsewhere.
