The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

George
W o o d c o c k
The Cherry Tree on Cherry Street
I saw you first as a cloud
fettered to a tree
whose huge gnarled branches draped
a long-lived wooden house.
We saw the house and tree,
its grey against your white.
We bought the house and you
continued to inhabit
your root-filled habitat.
The rooms were servant small,
the ceilings falling, the
paper draping off walls,
the basement an anthropologist's
agglomeration. Horse furniture,
old spades, the walls insulated
with newspapers whose readers
were long dead. The place's history.
This was the first land settled,
Vancouver, 1862, unnamed but months
before Gassy Jack loaded
his canoe with whisky.
The Irish McCleerys, disaffected,
built their house
on the escarpment.
This was a hired man's hut,
embellished by generations of
Gothicizing carpenters. And
here they planted their great orchard
and called it Cherry Street.