“Branches Never Remember:” a somber sentiment, one I can’t take too seriously, too grave a thought, too heavy, not light like a falling leaf; it’d be a curse for a limb to fall and not linger afterwards as a phantom. We have pictures, not photographs, of one another, as we fall away, landing on the green lawn, soon brown or soon flooded. As the flood’s current takes the branches from the tree, one by one, they wave and we wave back. Atom bombs of ash black the Sun; the sunburn peels; ash does away with our homes and branches. From the afterlife, “Go bury my heart;” branches at Chickamauga. Maybe we have a photograph, folded up gnawed in our pockets, at the early onset of dementia. Our faculties slip, and still there’s the scrap book on the coffee table, before the robbery.
Don’t play “Branches Never Remember” at my funeral.
Maybe “When Johnny comes marching home…”
Or “When Josie comes home…”
But not this somber crawl.
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