BOXWOOD PRINT

I close my eyes and see it still
The glowing water, neon leaves;
In shadows, ghosts of Arapaima
Weave among the tendrils.

I find a space beneath the roots,
The mystic water’s copper smell
Reminds me of a hope
And makes me comfortably fear.

about the writer

Marin lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with their wife and 2 cats.

This year may bring storms, but the peach tree in the backyard is covered in tiny fruits. In time these will grow to ripe juicy peaches that will be shared with loved ones. These are the things that are important.

why boxwood?

When I was young, up on a shelf, there was a book that was so old you couldn’t read the cover. It sat there until one day, standing on the sofa to reach it, I took the book down and began to read. I found it full of stories passed down from storyteller to storyteller in Germany’s Black Forest. One of those stories was called “Sons of Knoist.”

“Sons of Knoist” was my earliest exposure to a genre of literature known as nonsense tales. Parts of the story may have made more sense in the time and place of its telling, but I suspect that its "boat with no bottom to it" and "chapel in a mighty big tree" have always held the same dreamlike strangeness that captured my imagination then.

Toward the end of the poem, in that chapel in the tree, two new figures appeared: a beechwood sexton and a boxwood parson. Did the storyteller mean that they were carvings brought to life? Or were they leafy tree-clergy with bark-like skin and uprooted feet? Whatever their nature, the image of the boxwood parson stuck fast in my imagination, and has remained throughout my life.

Nonsense poetry speaks to me as a nonbinary person. It takes seriously its own contradictions and drops the facade of a 'natural order.' As a neurodivergent person, I find solidarity in the experience of a world unlike our own, where rules must be learned anew. And as someone who dreams of change, I see myself in those who do the impossible.