Orange Jasmine Tree (on Earth Day)

Orange Jasmine Tree
(A 2005 Speakeasy Poetry Prize Winner)

It got to be something else,
something saturating,
the way this orange jasmine tree
would bloom
its faith into the room.
Women will do that, too;
I’ve been accused.

Its flowers were silk white trumpets
and tainted tongues;
its smell was of the variety
you would have had to choose,
and in the morning
the floor was covered
with its sudden decrepitude, though
there were yet and always buds
where just before there had been blooms.

I wreathed the tree with blue lights at Christmas,
I carried it outside in summer,
I fed it to the birds, I bluntly pruned,
and always I was squandered, shamed
by its apparent fortitude. You couldn’t make the tree
any less luscious if you tried;
you couldn’t intercede,
or so it seemed, and I grew careless,
the way some women are grown careless with.

Frost killed it. A single episode
of weather and reckless disregard,
and though I carried it back inside
toward the warm, it died spectacularly,
splitting itself from its song
and crashing, in pieces, to the floor.
Night after night, a shattering, as if
the tree had been glass all along.