Poem | A Large Elm on Route 5 | Commonweal Magazine

Detail from the bark of a Chinese Elm (Anders Lorentsen/Unsplash)

You ask what I am at last but
understand the answer is not

subject to form or rather it is in
the form of myself,

cellulose compounds
endlessly recomposing.

I am standing by dint
of parts in tension,

for living is motion,
ends are beginnings

and hydrogen’s cleaving
begets all shining.

I am molten, ongoing,
shot from the heart

of all making
always giving up

to the gladdening
river that is myself.

Elizabeth Poreba is a retired New York City high-school English teacher. She has published two collections of poems, Vexed and Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring, and two chapbooks, The Family Profile and New Lebanon. The eighth line of this poem is from Elizabeth Willis’s poem, “And What My Species Did.” “Ruin from the air” is a reference to the book by the same name, written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts.