Robert Morgan

Where does such sadness in wood come from? How could longing live in these wires? The box looks like the most fragile coffin tuned for sound. And laid across the knees of this woman it looks less like a baby nursed than some symbolic Pietà, and the stretched body on her lap yields modalities of lament and blood, yields sacrifice and sliding chants of grief that dance and dance toward a new measure, a new threshold, a new instant and new year which we always celebrate by remembering the old and by recalling the lost and honoring those no longer here to strike these strings like secrets of the most satisfying harmonies, as voices join in sadness and joy and tell again what we already know, have always known but forget, from way back in the farthest cove, from highest on the peaks of love.

What a surprise it is to hear that locusts come the thirteenth year and not the seventeenth as told for ages and enshrined in old folklore and rhymes and family lies. The species similar otherwise: cicadas books call periodic, found here in our southern district. They grow from eggs pressed into twigs. The nymphs that hatch then start to dig at least ten inches into soil, and live by sucking juicy oil from roots and stems, sweet sap that nourishes through the giant nap, and then the lucky thirteenth year they grow a polished armor and crawl into the summer air and, louder than a Mahler choir, fill meadow, hedge, and orchard grove with necessary calls for love, then leave their eggs to fortune's whim with Philip Glass-like requiem.

It’s said they planted trees by graves to soak up spirits of the dead through roots into the growing wood. The favorite in the burial yards I knew was common juniper. One could do worse than pass into such a species. I like to think that when I’m gone the chemicals and yes the spirit that was me might be searched out by subtle roots and raised with sap through capillaries into an upright, fragrant trunk, and aromatic twigs and bark, through needles bright as hoarfrost to the sunlight for a century or more, in wood repelling rot and standing tall with monuments and statues there on the far hill, erect as truth, a testimony, in ground that’s dignified by loss, around a melancholy tree that’s pointing toward infinity.

In her nineties and afraid of weather and of falling if she wandered far outside her door, my mother took to strolling in the house. Around and round she’d go, stalking into corners, backtrack, then turn and speed down hallway, stop almost at doorways, skirt a table, march up to the kitchen sink and wheel to left, then swing into the bathroom, almost stumble on a carpet there. She must have walked a hundred miles or more among her furniture and family pics, mementos of her late husband. Exercising heart and limb, outwalking stroke, attack, she strode, not restless like a lion in zoo, but with a purpose and a gait, and kept her eyes on heaven’s gate.

We feel the volt inside our veins, inside the vines, inside the rain, and through the capillaries of a tree. We feel the pulse above in storms, vibrato of thunder, the whispering rhythms of a river, magnetic currents in the earth, the alternating flow of breath, the push of tides, reversing air from caves, dilating hum and dance of bees, the chant of auctioneer. All oscillate together, or they seem to, in this play of chance, beneath the stars' indifference.