38 Trees poems

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in Summer wear A nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.

—and he cried with a loud voice: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees— (R evelation ) They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens. For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall, The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves, With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all. I remember one evening of a long past Spring Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive. I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing, But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive. The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain, Green and high And lonely against the sky. (Down now!—) And but for that, If an old dead rat Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again. It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day; These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem: When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them. It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes; Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains, In the March wind, the May breeze, In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas. There was only a quiet rain when they were dying; They must have heard the sparrows flying, And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying— But I, all day, I heard an angel crying: ‘Hurt not the trees.’

In the fog which surrounds the trees, the leaves are stripped—leaves defaced already by slow oxidation, deadened by the sap's out-seeping for flowers' and fruits' gain, since the harsh heats of August made of them a less. In the bark, vertical furrows crease and slit where dampness drains to the earth's base, indifferent to the living citizens of the trunk. Flowers scattered, fruit conferred. Since youth, this relinquishing of breathing attributes and body parts has become for the trees a standard practice.

Round and round they go with a ribbon and garlanded flowers in hand. The bark won't unravel, the tree spells solidness—we grand, oaken, elmed selves of the ancients. Our pith is clean. There's no pining away for tomorrow, we are in current respiration, we move with the wind. Singular, we are stunning. In horde, we are dense, differing dream. The autumnal flashiness these days is drought-determined. We barely go beyond the red. Our hollows are never vacant. We live to board; we take the ax. Marbled inside the original stem. We were born we don't know when.

Leaves flare up, kitchen matches in the permanent trees. Black flash of pike on Mirror Lake, dropping like a roll of nickels. I don’t want nudes in paintings, I don’t want Beauty through the heart, small harpoon that opens when pulled out. I want to break another eggroll with you in moonlight. Ugly maples, when you’re gone.

1. Today they cut down the oak. Strong men climbed with ropes in the brittle tree. The exhaust of a gasoline saw was blue in the branches. The oak had been dead a year. I remember the great sails of its branches rolling out green, a hundred and twenty feet up, and acorns thick on the lawn. Nine cities of squirrels lived in that tree. Yet I was happy that it was coming down. "Let it come down!" I kept saying to myself with a joy that was strange to me. Though the oak was the shade of old summers, I loved the guttural saw. 2. By night a bare trunk stands up fifteen feet and cords of firewood press on the twiggy frozen grass of the yard. One man works every afternoon for a week to cut the trunk gradually down. Bluish stains spread through the wood and make it harder to cut. He says they are the nails of a trapper who dried his pelts on the oak when badgers dug in the lawn. Near the ground he hacks for two days, knuckles scraping the stiff snow. His chain saw breaks three teeth. He cannot make the trunk smooth. He leaves one night after dark. 3. Roots stiffen under the ground and the frozen street, coiled around pipes and wires. The stump is a platform of blond wood in the gray winter. It is nearly level with the snow that covers the little garden around it. It is a door into the underground of old summers, but if I bend down to it, I am lost in crags and buttes of a harsh landscape that goes on forever. When snow melts the wood darkens into the ground; rain and thawed snow move deeply into the stump, backwards along the disused tunnels. 4. The edges of the trunk turn black. In the middle there is a pale overlay, like a wash of chalk on darkness. The desert of the winter has moved inside. I do not step on it now; I am used to it, like a rock, or a bush that does not grow. There is a sailing ship beached in the cove of a small island where the warm water is turquoise. The hulk leans over, full of rain and sand, and shore flowers grow from it. Then it is under full sail in the Atlantic, on a blue day, heading for the island. She has planted sweet alyssum in the holes where the wood was rotten. It grows thick, it bulges like flowers contending from a tight vase. Now the stump sinks downward into its roots with a cargo of rain and white blossoms that last into October.

I wonder about the trees. Why do we wish to bear Forever the noise of these More than another noise So close to our dwelling place? We suffer them by the day Till we lose all measure of pace, And fixity in our joys, And acquire a listening air. They are that that talks of going But never gets away; And that talks no less for knowing, As it grows wiser and older, That now it means to stay. My feet tug at the floor And my head sways to my shoulder Sometimes when I watch trees sway, From the window or the door. I shall set forth for somewhere, I shall make the reckless choice Some day when they are in voice And tossing so as to scare The white clouds over them on. I shall have less to say, But I shall be gone.

As the storm-struck oak leaned closer to the house — The remaining six-story half of the tree listing toward the glass box Of  the kitchen like someone in the first tilt of stumbling — The other half crashed into the neighbors’ yards, a massive Diagonal for which we had no visual cue save for An antler dropped by a constellation — As the ragged half   leaned nearer, the second storm of cloying snow Began pulling on the shocked, still-looming splitting, and its branches dragged Lower like ripped hems it was tripping over Until they rustled on the roof under which I Quickly made dinner, each noise a threat from a body under which we so recently Said, Thank goodness for our tree, how it has accompanied us all these years, Thank goodness for its recitation of the seasons out our windows and over The little lot of our yard, thank goodness for the birdsong and 
squirrel games Which keep us from living alone, and for its proffered shade, the crack of the bat Resounding through September when its dime-sized acorns Land on the tin awning next door. Have Mercy on us, you, the massively beautiful, now ravaged and charged With destruction. We did speak like that. As if from a book of psalms Because it took up the sky

I loved this tree. South of San Antonio, west of the heart, growing in the ravines of the Pecos River inside me, down across the Rio Grande and up into the Llano’s staked plains, tree of memory, tree of ghosts, tree of rain— under birdsong whispers you cradled me in your canopy. When I was a baby, I stroked the soft hair on your leaves. You were my first true church, and when rains came our whole bodies shook and shimmered with God’s words. You let me bury all my secrets in your dirt and sleep in your altar as we drifted through stars. Forgive me, Tree, for humiliating you. I kicked at your bark. Spit on you. Tree, I cut you and carved cruel words on you in reverse in my rough, crooked cursive, with a rusted green knife I stole from a bitch, scarring your sacred skin. I burned you with a lighter shaped like a cowboy boot, left bird dogs tied to you for days on end, let drill sergeants in training from the nearby base lash out and practice on you. I let belly-gods, plug-ugly bruisers, devouring cowboys and butchers stuff themselves into me, hog-tie me whole and slap me around as you watched. When I laughed and made animal sounds, I scared you. I chewed you out. Made fun of you. I used toxins and poisons to make you immaculate. I wanted you perfect. I nailed a no-trespassing sign and a big security light to your side. I sold pieces of you off. I abandoned you. I abandoned myself. All around us the underground world overflows with love. Season after season you return, sap rising up from your roots, unfinished, always becoming. I defended against love for as long as I could until I couldn’t. You no longer have to hide your self in your deepest self. You no longer need the ones you thought you most needed. I know I am not good at this, or anything really, but I’m trying. Roll on, roll on, roll on— Tonight, I’m wearing a red dress, under a man’s honeyed mouths and tent. Your red flowers open and crown and cover us in a Sunday of pollens. And when I press my ear to your thickness, to your heart, I hear: bells, bells, bells.

Between what should and what should not be Everything is liable to explode. Many times I was told who has no land has no sea. My father Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story Of a sycamore tree he used to climb When he was young to watch the rain. Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red. My brother believed bad dreams could kill A man in his sleep, he insisted We wake my father from his muffled screams On the night of the day he took us to see his village. No longer his village he found his tree amputated. Between one falling and the next There’s a weightless state. There was a woman Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand. When she left. I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew Could turn anyone into one-half reptile. I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being The only one left. When we woke my father He was running away from soldiers. Now He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king And tried not to stop. He flew But mother woke him and held him for an hour, Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward. Maybe if I had just said it. Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe I don’t know much about dreams But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead Know about the dying and sometimes Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree My father used to climb When he was young to watch the rain stream, And he would gently swing.