Past Perfect Tense
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By David B. Ruderman

David B. Ruderman

Something, on the one hand, is gone,
The bulk of it pieced and hauled away this morning.
Its branches used to brush against my window when the wind blew,
Perhaps preceded by an empty space.

A ground has been created like the functioning of prayer,
Necessary, muddy, strewn about the yard.
French painters could not picture it,
A bitumen that seems to deepen ever from within.

A disease that came from China is what did it.
The men say almost nothing ever killed an Ash before,
But this is something different, something new.

So what has brought these rounds of birds,
Their shocking reds and tiny whites and browns,
The orange one, liturgical and robed,
Rising up and falling, indicating only flight.

David B. Ruderman lives with his wife and two children in Ann Arbor, where he is (“supposedly,” he says) working on his PhD in English literature. Aside from writing poems, he also plays guitar in the experimental pop music band Sissy Spaceship. His poems have won the Hopwood award in poetry, and have appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review and the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

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