It was nothing like this before
blight struck the American chestnut.
The tree’s branching spread, covering
the country since the Eocene, in less
than half a century, near disappeared.

Living in an after, leftover, as a late comer,
is not the ideal. That’s to get back
to an overstory thickly the same, with scant
understory. A love with no former lovers’
notes stuck in books on a shelf you share.

Now conservationists visit the few remaining
chestnuts to rub pure pollen, unhybridized,
on flowers’ styles, bag and tape them closed
so they won’t get fertilized by whatever
airborne spore happens to float by.


*
Once, chestnuts fattened pigs and cattle
in the countryside, the tree lent its name
to streets in every city. Doors, walls, floors,
poles, pianos, cribs, coffins, were hewn of
chestnut lumber. The uses so numerous.

Once, I rented an apartment on East Chestnut.
Went out from it without jacket or wallet, just
a single cigarette, to ask for a light, and then
see what covers would be waived, tabs not kept,
makings of the night might drift my way.

It wasn’t just that the trees withered, also the wood
wasn’t rot-proof as hoped. It silvered, needed repair,
fell. I was worn out by bars, strangers, shouting names
into too many ears. Instead of broad possibilities,
I began to tune to the once in the story, that singularity.


*
Today, experts breed chestnuts of mixed varieties,
native and foreign, then breed back out any new quality
—save blight resistance—creating an elite strain.
Such selectivity can seem good if considered as working
for the future by winnowing down. All I am able to do

is walk the woods, searching for a particular chestnut:
the most southerly survivor, lowest, and very last
on the map. It’s said to be in the county where, after
our latest move, my love and I live. Neither of us
are the first to call the other by that term.

But for fifteen years now we’ve been leaving
places, changing addresses, together. Hardiness
is best assessed, not by determining the age of trees,
but considering conditions a specimen has grown in,
overcome. The soil here is rocky, dry.


*
Most wild chestnuts that sprout now die before
they reach a decade of age. I must go home before
I have any find to report, before dark. But before
is more than an era that exists no longer. 
In directions, it cues what’s to come—the blaze

on the trail when there’s a mile until the viewpoint.
Or it’s a landmark given to a driver—to pass and then
know that the next right is the turn to take. Another way
to say it is a chestnut has achieved a feat if it lives
10 years. I must go home; my love is preparing dinner.

And, for the hybrids planted in the time since
I’ve been scraping the dishes at the same
kitchen counter where he washes and sways,
whose measure of history starts in this period,
there is better ahead.



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