Steve Deutsch

Best Intentions

I planted that copper beech
50 years ago today
for my 30th birthday.
It was little more than a stick,

barely surviving
its first three years,
although I watered
and trimmed it

and would have fed it
with a spoon
if I’d known how.
It’s magnificent now—

about 60 feet tall,
but entwined in power lines
and too damn close
to the house.

Tree surgeons are out back,
with their chainsaws
and mini-crane.
It will take a day or two

to cut it down.
Makes me wonder
if I was right to plant
it in the first place.

How responsible
are we
for what we nurture?
Trees, pets, children,

things we bring
to the world
or shepherd on their way?
Fragile as faith.

In the clearing stands a boxer
From Paul Simon’s The Boxer

My uncle Frankie talked with his hands—
a steady plume of cigarette smoke
bothered his eyes and yellowed
his battered face.

We rarely visited,
knew that Frankie had a past
so bad no one would talk of it.
But today he talked of my dad,

and about the Golden Gloves
he almost won.
So strange to imagine my father,
potbellied from pushing a hack,

with the fastest hands in Brooklyn.
But to hear Frankie tell it
you could barely see my old man’s fists—
flying so fast

they were unblockable.
“Why didn’t he win?”
we asked in unison,
but Frankie just nodded

at a picture of my dad
and lit another Camel
with the smoldering end
of his stub.

 

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and is poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. His Chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full-length books, Persistence of Memory and Going, Going, Gone, were published by Kelsay. Slipping Away was published this spring. Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press and has just been published.