i remember my father.

explaining to me with his thin hands

why trees were pressed with snow.

the sapling’s surface arching north,

like a torso that takes

the brunt of a beating

in a wind-torn storm.

now 25. driving up route 2.

staring at the bare, brown

bark. concave south and

its empty skin,

like a torso that sidesteps

the brunt of a beating

in a wind-torn storm.

Marshall Dury is a graduate of the University of Maine Honors Program, and now teaches and writes in Massachusetts.