April 28, 2026

A note about this poem:

When I was in 4th grade, my classmates and I learned to recite Lewis Carroll’s marvelously quirky poem, “Jabberwocky.” The poemis made up of a slew of made-up words, which is one of the best reasons I can think of to memorize it. (I remember getting so excited to say “jub-jub bird” and “beamish” and “Bandersnatch.”) I can still remember much of it 45 years later.

This piece below came out of an exercise inspired by my experience of memorizing learning “Jabberwocky” which I offered in recent writing workshop I led called “Jigsaw Poetry.” I invited participants to bring a list of 15-25 words related to an area of study they knew little to nothing about. (For me this was astrophysics, mushroom identification, or metalsmithing.) The objective of the exercise was to create a piece of writing that included someone else’s words without looking up the definitions of any words that were unfamiliar and, instead, to try and feel what the words might mean and create a piece around that feeling.

In this poem, I used words from a list a participant had assembled which were comprised of terms related to trees. (The words I used were “sheath,” “biofilm,” “glabrous,” “payload,” “lopper,” “leaf scorch,” “cambium,” “cocciodosis,” “hard-wire cloth,” “anvil,” “biosecurity,” “layer mesh,” “abscission,” “understory,” “callus,” “fuselage,” “squamose,” “alloy” and “taproot.” I did not know the meaning of more than half of these, which means that in the following poem I have likely used them incorrectly!

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taproot

Remember those days when you were a gazelle,
bounding down the broad parquet en route
to a lay-up, your skin sheathed in a biofilm of grace,
the floor glabrous, sheened with purpose? How your heels
lifted with the payload your body carried in its grip,
your eyes pure cambium? You were no lopper, no leaf scorch,
no accident of cocciodosis. There was no hard-wire cloth reeling
you in, no anvil of gravity.

Now, the news keeps your gaze fixed on the planet’s
biosecurity, the poisoned layer mesh of the earth’s endangered,
melting poles. You never agreed to this abscission,
this squamose uncertainty of the future.

You want to go back to that rank gymnasium,
where an understory of glories began whispering their first
sentences, before the calluses took shape, before
the fuselage of disappointments and rejections.
Back when it was just you and the ball, alloyed,
finding the taproot of your greatness, running
full speed ahead.