There were young
Trees—
reaching with
fruitless branches
into dreamless stew
— wishing
they had never welcomed
the stranger vines,
which creep
toward their tips,
filching the clean air
of the pioneering sky:
they enrobe the limbs,
and fill the crags
and the ruddy
bark…
The children mistake them for mint,
their leaves;
sweet,
some new tales tell…
Their vines are bitter,
streaked with damascus,
folding,
rough,
and malnourished…
The sweetness, of course,
is a lie. And when you allow
that shallow vine to root, you yourself
lose what depth you once had
in its face building
fervor.
I am dressed in a sweater,
warm and tidy,
unlike my words
which decorate my conversations
like tinsel un-certainly
placed.
I am wearing a smile
and telling people
that one day I
will write.
I comb my hair nicely
and talk in subtle jokes
and I wonder all the while
if I am interesting
or attractive…
I remember thinking
of whom I wanted to be,
sitting in the shade of
a kudzu striped evergreen tree,
feeling the sun on my skin,
perhaps then and there deciding that
being
was only as deep as those rays could reach.
Today I am dressed in vines,
the stripes,
the milky, leaves
rough, and deceptive.
They do not grow, these
leaves,
From my branches.
They creep up from the earth in which I root,
they steal the very air I
breathe,
they take my branches for a corpse,
and feed like hungry
worms.
– Poem by Craig Weimer
Craig Weimer – My biographical statement could best be described as short. I grew up in the Suburbs of Morgantown, West Virginia, where one could be surrounded by civilization one moment and completely, totally alone the next, those two moments being separated by only a short walk.