POISON 

From our elevated perch 
the oak below was a swath 

stretching across 
every contour of the canyon.

Intermittent patches of red 
burst through the sprawling terrain 

like a rash, an epidemic.
It’s poison oak, she said.

If we were on the ground,
beneath them,

looking up,
we’d see vines 

climbing the branches, 
higher and higher, 

leaves burning 
their little fires.

Somehow I knew the canyon
was a metaphor

for something else  
that had grown up inside 

the cradle 
of a pandemic.

At the center of what we saw,
a ghost tree,

bare, silver-white—
more metaphor:

the stricken spirit of a thing 
that had lived and died

too quickly, surrounded by 
a growing poison.