LIGNUM VITAE

A prose poem that explores the feelings of leaving home and the memories of what we leave behind.

ALL WE DID was hang a swing.

Then it was up to the tree.

It held the rope, held me, held the Pothos twisting around its trunk, climbing onward to its branches, reminding me of Tarzan swinging through the jungle on vines that hung from trees.

My mother with her garden shears had her own reasons. The tree would live. I understood this but it still broke my heart.

What I couldn’t say then was that the lizards needed those vines. The males with their throat-pouches glowing orange needed somewhere to vanish after their courting display, somewhere the rest of the world couldn’t follow. Don’t we all.

After the cutting, they still came. But it was not the same. Out in the open, their little performances no longer had those broad Pothos leaves as curtains. They had nothing but bare bark and light. As I watched, my brain tried to work out something monumental, but I didn’t know what to call it.

While the tree marked time in decades, my stomach that summer marked time in the swing rope rubbing against the branch, each time I swung myself up. Each time, excitement or dread, I couldn’t always tell which it was.

I was moving on. The tree wasn’t going anywhere. That was the whole problem.

It would still be there, the same branch angled just right for a rope, the same canopy with its deep green leaves, its clusters of vibrant bluish-purple flowers, fading to a silvery-blue, and I would be somewhere else, not yet knowing if I was worth the leaving.

The vines came back, eventually. Vines always do. That year, though, the bare trunk, the lizards in full view of everything, me on the swing watching the world beyond the wall; we were all exposed at once, with nowhere for us to hide.

Author’s Note

The swing came before anything else. I remembered it before I found the poem. A tree with Pothos. A summer I can date almost to the week.

Lignum Vitae means wood of life. It’s a Caribbean genus, and I picked the title before I understood why, which happens sometimes.

My mother cut the vines that year to save our Lignum Vitae tree. (A friend had told her the Pothos would kill it.) I understood the logic and hated it anyway. What I didn’t say to anyone then: it wasn’t only the tree I was thinking about. The lizards in that poem are real. I just didn’t know, until I wrote it down, that I’d been quietly grieving something on their behalf for years. I was packing to leave home for college around the same time, so maybe, not only grieving the lizards.

I was gone, but the vines were not. They grew back the following year. I only mention it because leaving out true things doesn’t feel right, even the ones I don’t quite know what to do with.

Upcoming…

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  NONLINEAR LIFE, 08 August 2026

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