38 Trees poems

Fair tree! for thy delightful shade 'Tis just that some return be made; Sure some return is due from me To thy cool shadows, and to thee. When thou to birds dost shelter give, Thou music dost from them receive; If travellers beneath thee stay Till storms have worn themselves away, That time in praising thee they spend And thy protecting pow'r commend. The shepherd here, from scorching freed, Tunes to thy dancing leaves his reed; Whilst his lov'd nymph, in thanks, bestows Her flow'ry chaplets on thy boughs. Shall I then only silent be, And no return be made by me? No; let this wish upon thee wait, And still to flourish be thy fate. To future ages may'st thou stand Untouch'd by the rash workman's hand, Till that large stock of sap is spent, Which gives thy summer's ornament; Till the fierce winds, that vainly strive To shock thy greatness whilst alive, Shall on thy lifeless hour attend, Prevent the axe, and grace thy end; Their scatter'd strength together call And to the clouds proclaim thy fall; Who then their ev'ning dews may spare When thou no longer art their care, But shalt, like ancient heroes, burn, And some bright hearth be made thy urn.

The aqua green goes with the pink in a way no one knows what will happen. Every step is a dangerous taking. Amazing the time span of a trunk (a door opens in it and suddenly, someone is asking how this came to be). The green curtain is a pressed chime which when rung rings in a dogwood white as if a storm were approaching its green extreme. Brick crumbles into living pond particle while a bent hook holds back the last dissolve. An uneasy leap over a sharky sea. Gravity plays its little emotive role. It’s Elm Street all over again, ragged walkways lead to Toon Town. Hello kids. Hello Jimmy Neutron. The blanket rises, and under it, a fetishistic pompadour green, greener and paler than bluebird. But hush, the nuclear power plant is about to blow unless Jimmy can locate the elusive button. A siren and standing-by fire truck. It looks like a lost cause until presto, a messenger. A racketing aside. The day is dragged here and there but still can’t be saved. BAM. Immediately the next second clicks into the skyscape apocalypse. In the dust, a celluloid woman mows a multilayered lawn. The arch overhead reads, O Art Still Has Truth Take Refuge. Where? There. There, there, says someone.

(For George Reston Malloch) There’s teuch sauchs growin’ i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch. Like the sauls o’ the damned are they, And ilk ane yoked in a whirligig Is birlin’ the lee-lang day. O we come doon frae oor stormiest moods, And Licht like a bird i’ the haun’, But the teuch sauchs there i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch As the deil’s ain hert are thrawn. The winds ’ud pu’ them up by the roots, Tho’ it broke the warl’ asunder, But they rin richt doon thro’ the boddom o’ Hell, And nane kens hoo fer under! There’s no’ a licht that the Heavens let loose Can calm them a hanlawhile, Nor frae their ancient amplefeyst Sall God’s ain sel’ them wile.

Softly pummeled overnight, the lower limbs of our Norway spruce flexed and the deepening snow held them. Windless sunlight now, so I go out wearing hip waders and carrying not a fly rod but a garden hoe. I begin worrying the snow for the holdfast of a branch that’s so far down a wren’s nest floats above it like a buoy. I work the hoe, not chopping but cradling, then pull straight up. A current of air as the needles loft their burden over my head. Those grace notes of the snowfall, crystals giving off copper, green, rose—watching them I stumble over a branch, go down and my gloves fill with snow. Ah, I find my father here: I remember as a child how flames touched my hand the time I added wood to the stove in our ice-fishing shanty, how he plunged that hand through the hole into the river, teaching me one kind of burning can ease another. The branch bobs then tapers into place and composes itself, looking unchanged though all summer it will bring up this day from underfoot.

For Ruth Fainlight I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing. Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? This is rain now, this big hush. And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic. I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires. Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. I let her go. I let her go Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. How your bad dreams possess and endow me. I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches?—— Its snaky acids hiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

Immense, entirely itself, it wore that yard like a dress, with limbs low enough for me to enter it and climb the crooked ladder to where I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone. One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell darkening the sidewalk. Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches, I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy, watching it happen without it happening to me.

For a tree, you're the worst kind of friend, remembering everything. Pale-skinned, slightly brailled, blank page of pre-adolescence. The way the smallest knife-slice would darken with time, rise and widen. mark was here. Left his. But these are the digs you're used to, sufferer of mere presence, scratched years, scratched loves we wanted to write on the world and couldn't trust to an eardrum. (I scarred you myself long ago with my own jack-knife, jill-name. You took her as the morning unsteamed around me. Took us as we had to be taken, in.) Old relief, new reminder, I was young, what could I have written? Didn't care then, had to see it scraped out, big letters beneath your erotic nubs and crotches. O beech, it's no big riddle: we fell in the forest, you heard. Quiet, in your own way. In your own way, spreading the word.

It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books— Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

The neighbor calls the Siberian Elm a “weed” tree, demands we hack it down, says the leaves overwhelm his property, the square backyard. He’s collar-and-tie. A weed tree? Branches screen buildings, subway tracks, his patch of yard. We disagree, claim back the sap, heartwood, wild bark. He declares the tree “hazardous.” We shelter under leaf-hoard, crossway for squirrels, branch house for sparrows, jays. The balcony soaks up the shade. Chatter-song drowns out cars below. Sun branches down. Leaves overwhelm. The tree will stay. We tell him “no.” Root deep through pavement,Elm.

They were the local Ohio palm, tropic in the heat of trains. They could grow in anything—pitch, whole grain, cinders, ash and rust, the dirt dumped back of the foundry, what the men wore home. Little willows, they were made to be brushed back by the traffic of boxcars the way wind will dust the shade of the small part of a river.—They'd go from almost green to almost gray with each long passing, each leaf, each branch a stain on the winded air. They were too thin for rain—nothing could touch them. So we'd start with pocketknives, cutting and whittling them down, from willow, palm, or any other name. They were what they looked like. Horsewhip, whipweed. They could lay on a fine welt if you wanted. And on a hot, dry day, July, they could all but burn. At a certain age you try to pull all kinds of things out of the ground, out of the loose gravel thrown by trains. Or break off what you can and cut it clean.