Floating along at seventy miles an hour
I see them through the windshield.
My eyes lock on and in a split second
the image zips to the side window,
but my focus snaps back to the front.
As a child, going to visit family,
I saw them from the back seat.
But,
I’ve been this way since,
going to other funerals.
Turnpike trees could be any trees,
but these are attached to my memories
with familial ties.
They are young and old, tall and growing,
crooked and straight, broken and dying.
Maryland trees morph into Pennsylvania trees.
As I rise into the mountains
their character converts,
a little starker, a little thinner, a little darker.
Closer to the wake now,
Here’s the city.
As I enter the funeral parlor,
More trees standing there, moving and swaying
with the inner wind of emotion.
They are familiar, too.
They’re older, as am I,
their shapes more sloped,
Like the falling off of the land that holds
the turnpike trees.
But the voices I know.
My uncle, one hundred and one years old,
Sits on a couch, his walker by his side.
He just lost his youngest son
to inferior doctoring.
He’s an old, gnarled tree, and the sapling
who grew at his side,
cut down.
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Those last several lines! Devastating. 💕