Ann Hudson: If You Can Climb Up, You Can Climb Down

Ann Hudson grew up in Charlottesville, Va., in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but has lived in Chicago for the past 11 years. Her first book, The Armillary Sphere, was selected by Mary Kinzie as the winner of the Hollis Summers Prize, and was published by Ohio University Press in 2006. Ann was also one of MWC's 2010 Great River Writers' Retreat winners and held a reading at St. Ambrose University on October 22 with Paul Brooke. During the retreat, she was the guest of the Sisters of Saint Mary Monastery where she spent the week writing and exploring the nuns’ 90 beautiful acres of land. She thanks the MWC for this fantastic opportunity. You can find this poet at www.annhudson.net.

Her poem shows a child looking at her world from a new perspective and her stalling to return. It also shows how the parent is pleased with her daughter’s discovery. Yet, the voice slips from present to the past. Though the past is gone, it lingers beneath the ground. I will let parents realize the metaphor.

If You Can Climb Up, You Can Climb Down

Today my daughter’s classmate
teaches her to climb a tree,
a runty crabapple in the corner
of the playground. It’s stooped and low,
the branches curved in a goblet of leaves
that holds two young girls perfectly,
their knees clamped against the rough bark.
It’s about high time someone
showed her how to scramble up
the short trunk and swing her torso
over a branch, pivoting her weight
to her advantage. They perch up there
all recess and again after school,
and although I scold her about ignoring
my warnings that we need to go,
and tell her a dozen times
not to work her fingers into the tear
in her leggings until I can mend them,
I’m pleased. Particularly in the flatlands,
it’s a good thing to find a place to climb
up and away, to vanish in a canopy
of leaves and ivory blossoms. It’s good
to let your shoes dangle off the ground,
to feel gravity cuffing your ankles.
Look out where there once was prairie:
switchgrass, clover, false heather,
horsemint, wild carrot, junegrass, aster.
Below the roots of the crabapple
are dormant bluestem rhizomes,
gnarled and still multiplying underground.