The Memorial Tree Battered plate, battered life. Plumed reed and paperbark surround that memorial, certain heirs of late afternoon and evening drifting like phantoms around that blurred steel lake, now ancient with new faces, my face lost in that ripple of glass, ripple that comes to all living things, the realization that life is not what you expect, and that glorious crown, charming everyone with heart-struck bedazzle, may tomorrow just be a faded visage of an earlier hope, withheld by a greater force, propelling everything. That tree waits, patiently, for its reincarnation as something, something, at least, for those cold words on the memorial do not signify