Crusty and easily broken, the bark is in my hands. It is
Brown, white, black, and red like all of us. I could break
It very easily, even if I didn't try. It is dead, a
Part of a whole dead. Bark is a shell that protects.
This shell is dead. I hope my shell is stronger
Than bark---than wood---than yours. How old was
The tree? We don't know how old. How old am I?
I am a thinly covered nineteen year old. Crusty and easily
Broken, the bark is in my hands. This shell is dead.
The material from which "Bark" was written came from a poetry seminar with Susan Kallet, head of the creative writing division at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and author of How to Get Heat Without Fire. Several objects were brought in and laid on a coffee table, each student was instructed to pick an object and just write about it for 10 minutes. I picked up a piece of bark, wrote a couple of pages about it, then we were asked to circle a few lines from our writing that kind of stuck out and form a poem from what was written. "Bark" was subsequently created.