Mother Cottonwood

Mother Cottonwood
in the Dust of the River Mud
your roots wrapped around bone
like they asked you to

you stood too long
Learned to hold the pose
Doomed to only dance when the wind blows

under you, we crawled, fed, bred, and died
lit by the wrong light
In the blue nights
you tried

you possessed
All the late arrivals
All the almosts
And any of the anythings
But they don’t leave, do they?

Rings full and tightened
somethin’ turns
The knowing of holding too on
roots soften
that weight shifts
you try
but then you don’t

the earth takes you
Like it took hellfire before

And now you begin
everything that needed you
proves it didn’t
In the silence
is wonder

Light gets in where it shouldn’t
And insides split
to anything small enough to split
it, bugs tattoo
mushrooms breed
And green threads through
No more you and them anymore

Now closer to the Dust of the River Mud
Mother Cottonwood
I nap in your death
Like a seed

When I meet your roots
and I learn to pose
And dance when I need to bleed

Spring makes a mess of me and you.
It’s the new sunlight and all the life squeezed into the air.

It gets down to just three things: suffering, then death, and then seasons but standing under you, split cottonwood on the riverbank, it feels like all three are happening at once.

You used to be great: bark burnt from wildfires, scars restless with bugs, small lives gathering in you and past you for centuries, mistaking a long-term plan as a need, for you, a breath of a moment.

Then came our quiet ending.

For you, it started in our bones. Strength into fragility hour by hour, your roots’ grip loosening wood-grain by wood-grain; until the whole sky tipped sideways and you went down hard, scattering every creature that once trusted your shade. Leaves so fast they shatter like glass. A completely unexpected explosion.

Everyone was silenced after your fall.

But Spring doesn’t care about witnesses.

Sunlight reaches into the places your body kept for itself and
from your ribs, ants write new routes.
And from your wounds, fungi breathe.
The vines find the negatives of your scars and fill them in, soft and patient.

Your hollow turns into a home.
Your rot beats warm.
And as you sink, the forest rises to meet you, trading height for depth, and crowns for undergrowth.
This is the part the writers always try to pretty up: calling it a rebirth, a pilgrimage, some sweet return to Heaven.

But up close, rebirth looks like this: tragedy, collapse, uncertainty, quiet, then hidden things growing out of what no longer remembers how to grow itself.

And it all happens as planned, directly in front of your eyes.

The seasons don’t take from you; they layer and paint.

Grief settles in your roots, joy blows through you like pollen, and love bends the light but leaves its shape behind in our leaves.

Nothing is lost. Nothing gained. No one leaves forever.

Everything just changes position.

Spring keeps asking for belief in spite of ample evidence of itself and I come back to the Rio Grande and watch you answer me with your leftover body.

Not rising again, not restored, but broken open, overgrown and feeding everything.

I think that’s the only kind of resurrection I can trust.
The kind that gives us a second chance.

March 31, 2026

arden briar smith