My tree. The starpine. Driving away for the last time. A.

 

Mary says “ you don’t need that level of protection anymore. The canon you made. Arminta translated meant protection” d

I marched you to protection! That year you lived here. You took your pottery wheels and got the hell out of the mountains. You deserve better. You are wonderful and kind and strong. You will March to protection here and other places.

Our self esteems were shot.

Her with her boyfriend and me with Chris and then Barbara. He’d thrown her out of a moving car on Topanga canyon.

I feared Barbara, as she set my lawn chairs on fire and made ray sick just so I would use the popsicles she brought me to make him better. She needed to be needed.

But I wasn’t smart enough to pick up all the cues she was laying on me. 

Nor did I want to sit and think about it all because it frightened me half to death.

I love you she’d say and then she’d bring a notary to my home. “ I’ve known you since you were a little girl,  now hand over your stock profile”

The reality of having no one to turn to including my mom, her best friend was sickening as her full insanity surfaced.

I told her I was gay one night in the kitchen “ ah yes, I had sex with my mother.”

So nonchalant.

Mary came to live. Chris had left.

It was during this time I met this tree. Oh starpine lover of starpine!

Poems. Recurrent dreams. Fantasies. Prayers. 

I’d sit to escape Barbara. This tree. To escape heaviness. 

Oh star pine. Lover of star pine.