A hollowed-out trunk in a field, a tree
I never knew -- catalpa, maybe, or elm --
to us a shallow fort we soon outgrew,
it withstood a hard decade of winters.

Look at it now: a fat stub or lump
stuck in my imagination, like a crumb
brushed under table linen. Frost,
no doubt, had killed it, or who knows,

a rare pestilence of scarabs. Yet glued
still to the inside wall of my cranium
it remains somehow, faded, to be exhumed
like this, its jagged edges splintering

above that thick hide of snow we loved
to puncture with our boots, stumbling
into its core. And it has worn through
the years of my forgetting friends' names,

the total casualties of the Arab war -- a trace
of nothing, a place where I scraped my knee
once, sat down on its roots and cried,
though who can recall what for.

(Originally appeared in Louisiana Literature 16.2 (Fall 1999): 119;
forthcoming in Gallery of Ghosts, Story Line Press, 2001)