Trumpet Vines

James Hart

Like their heads lolling in the wind,

I thought I’d love their clustered trumpets,

orange clumps, funnel throats,

volleys bursting from roadside vines,

their music of abandonment pushing toward

heaven’s stages on fence posts and poles

of singing wires,

tangled masses of them pulling down

vacant houses like requiems

of loss and lassitude.

And for some years I did

love them for their orange music

where some voluntarily took root and rose

through a honeysuckle shrub,

others amassing in the privet hedge

beside the drive until

the largo of their leaves and seasons

began to choke the limbs

supporting them, until even I felt trapped

in their green orchestral curtain.

Now it’s a long siege of grubbing

out, knowing hidden nodes

of roots will spring up opening notes,

and hard to know at which of human stages,

like hindsight, second thought, or memory,

how some music from a life lived

along abandoned roadsides

will overwhelm us with its thrust,

choke the throats that know its

volleys from the silent vines.

July 13, 2001

Trumpet Vines on Small Red Barn