Wet leaves slick the woods trail and stick to my boots. I only have an hour.
I’ve been trying to convince my 10-yr-old daughter to watch the movie Little Shop of Horrors.
When I’m dead, will she remember me when singing alone from films we watched together?
The last time I walked these woods, the path was nearly swallowed by July’s green-walled weedy opulence.
At her age, singing with my cassette tape of The Little Mermaid, I heard echoes of “Somewhere That’s Green” in “Part of Your World.”
Bending below overhanging locust branches I am not, still, part of these woods. Laundry awaits, and components of dinner.
When I turned over both cassettes and saw the same two names—Alan Menken, Howard Ashman—it was like surfacing from under water.
The creek trickles brown through brown. Maple roots exposed by washed-out soil on an incline become rungs for bootsoles.
I only come to the woods when life asks absolutely nothing else of an hour of me.
All Audrey wanted was a rectangle of green-ness without skyscraper alleys. All Ariel wanted was air that allowed for burning.
Whatever I am to my daughter on the day I die will be what I am to her forever.
I will have heard all the music I will ever hear. My daughter will discover more without me.
When she is sixty, she’ll rake dried memories of me into piles in her mind. I can’t choose them nor identify the trees they fell from.
At home, when I kick mud from my boots, how many fragments of how many trees will I have brought home, left just outside the door?
Kerry Trautman is a lifelong Ohioan, and a co-founder of ToledoPoet.com and the "Toledo Poetry Museum" page on Facebook, which promote Northwest Ohio poetry events. Her work has appeared previously in Parks & Points, as well as in numerous other journals and anthologies. Kerry's poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020,) Marilyn: Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas (Gutter Snob Books 2022,) and Unknowable Things (Roadside Press 2023.) Her fiction chapbook Irregulars is forthcoming in summer 2023 from Stanchion Books.
Banner image courtesy Derek Wright.
