TheBanyanTree: acorn after acorn

[Mike Pingleton]

the tavern dark and the dull autumn light
limned in the door's small pane spoke
of sundown over a forgotten river town
and despair at the sun's death for the year.

a towboat thrums, a resonance
invading earth and water and air alike.
the town fallen to its knees, dying by
degrees with its back to the water.

I was nursing an urge and a third beer
when the door blew in, framing
an apparition in orange backlight, stooping
to enter amid a whorled shower of leaves.

he fast filled the frame of my perception -
a horse-colored coat over camo blurred
and shifting, loomed over my stool.
"two ales," to the aproned shadow back

of the bar, his bright eyes never leaving mine,
"for me and my new friend." his voice a
mahogany woodwind from under a beard
the color of dark lichen on damp stone.

amid my muttered thanks he drank his down
to a trace of sliding foam, wiped his sleeve
through a rooted mass of moustache.
knotted hands, fingers skated over the dark bar.

"this bar, this wood was saved
from a steamboat run on a sandbar
in the year of your Lord nineteen
ought six - I can still feel her timbers
in the sand off the point."

I drank, his fingers traced a dark knot.

"this wood, this bar was dragged
up here on a logging sledge pulled
by two dappled grey percherons
owned by a man named Johns.
he died -"

he stared into a varnished pool of dark grain.

"this oak was cut from the east
edge of the Tensas tract down
in Mississippi, down where the
Lord God Bird made his final stand.
hauled to the mill by men and mules.

"this tree was the last of a line
of fifteen oaks grown and gone
since the icewall fled northward.
acorn after acorn after acorn -
oak following oak."

a gnarled thumb orbited a water ring.

"I knew them all.  and the last one
ends up entombed in a river tavern."
his eyes glittered in the silent dark
closing in around us.
"you know who I am?"

I nodded and drank and a cold
kernel of fear stuck in my throat.
his eyes held mine in their fists.
"they can cut me back, boy,
but they'll never cut me down."

turning and stomping into the dark
beyond the door amid
a skirl of leaves, a fading cool
breeze with a bite of tannin
and a taste of dark earth.

fumbling for my keys I could feel
him on the edge of my awareness,
out in the dark, out under the trees.
I drove away but I cannot get away.
I don't know what he wants from me.