The shape of my life is round
like the two pronged tree
growing in front of the old Leiper house

(And when I say old, I do mean old.
Thomas Leiper was a mill man
in the early days before there was
even a unified nation of colonies

This old house of his
is built into the side of a hill
overlooking a rocky creek
he used as the sight of his paper mill.

But poetry is not the place
for a history lesson:
so back to this tree
which I think of as rounded like me)

It is tall and craggy and almost leafless
Its upper half, where its many
satellite branches spread like capillaries,
is white washed like a fence

(or the trio of birches in my front yard
the year I kissed Erin Rose)
Its staunch lower half, the sturdy roots,
is a more traditional oak cast dull brown

What a bizarre tree; perhaps its
exceptionalism stayed Lieper’s hand
(I know - this tree, unlike the house,
is not that old. Though I wish it were.)

Behind this segregated marvel of a birch
is a glorious canvas of red and yellow,
leaves of an oak or elm or sycamore
more ordinary in its treeness than my birch

My tree, though, does not seem
to mind its ostentatious friend.
Instead, it ripples like a perturbed sea
in the late October breeze

Its upper reaches keep a watchful eye
over the new, noisy highway
that now subdivides Thomas Leiper’s house
from the ruins of his old mill,

which is a decrepit pile of rocks
worn smooth with the wind,
stashed neatly into the base of a cliff
along a bending elbow of the creek

The creek, shimmering like a new coin in the sun,
flows by obliviously, unaware that
Thomas Leiper long ago stopped making paper