By Justin Rigamonti

how it felt to see the city worker
sawing off her branches, though

pronouns aren’t the way. Not her, 
not bound by any human

construct. How alien they
seem to us, anyone who stands

outside our understanding. Except
she didn’t, the willow, flanked

as she was by two soaring columns
of our city’s green steel bridge.

But even green is construct—as if one word
could capture both bridge

and the luster of her leaves.
A single strand still clings to the human

discourse she endangered when
wind-weary, rain-weary, addled

by the warming climate, she tipped
into electrical wires. I wish

I’d been there in the dark. I wish
I’d stood with her between the cold

pillars and pressed my hands against
time. Told the soil to keep on

holding. Told the wind 
to stop for a moment, or blow 

backwards. But the wind can’t
hear me, can’t understand,

and you might never feel 
what I felt about her personhood.

That she was a person—as much
as you or me or the dog

sprawled out between my feet.
Our world is made of people,

and why not her? Not her, no—
but there she was, every night 

for over sixty years, lifting her 
desires like a feathered lantern:

more light and dark, more rain and sun, 
more sparrows, robins, 

people in her branches.

---

Justin Rigamonti teaches writing & publishing at Portland Community College and serves as the Program Coordinator for the Carolyn Moore Writing Residency. His poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Radar, New Ohio Review, Thrush, and Smartish Pace.