38 Trees poems

Why do you shiver there Between the white river and the road? You are not cold, With the sun light dreaming about you; And yet you lift your pliant supplicating arms as though To draw clouds from the sky to hide your slenderness. You are a young girl Trembling in the throes of ecstatic modesty, A white objective girl Whose clothing has been forcibly taken away from her.

All day I tried to distinguish need from desire. Now, in the dark, I feel only bitter sadness for us, the builders, the planers of wood, because I have been looking steadily at these elms and seen the process that creates the writhing, stationary tree is torment, and have understood it will make no forms but twisted forms.

is an opening, is all we can see of  the long strands that make the pathways for rays, bisecting annular rings, the most vulnerable door of  what makes the holiest of things.

Today the date palms were pruned, the branches taken before the fruit ripened, before sweetness littered the sidewalks. The man who sawed them worked alone, a crane lifting him to the yellowed fronds. Beside his truck, he stood tall, American, a pensive pioneer. The top of each palm looked like the back of a man's head after a close-crop haircut, the neck cooled to a stubbly remembrance of hair, or was like a cat after being spayed, startled by a strange newness, pacing familiar rooms, darting, confused, and you (had you wished to console) are greeted with a barren gaze. The rubble of bark and fronds reminded me of Iraq, not the ruined bridges, or the surrendering soldiers' hands begging food, but the 16 million date palms, one per capita, lining the seams of the Tigris and Euphrates, a reminder of my own Libya and its 10 million date palms and the years of easy wealth that brought them neglect except in Huun, a magical city where they stuffed dates with almonds and sent them as far as Tanta and Oum Dourman. From Huun this story: a boy stands by a palm imploring his uncle to toss him a fistful of dates. Flustered by the boy's monotonous cries the uncle loses his feet, and as he falls to his death, cries down "Here nephew, I'm coming down with the dates!" So that's what we got from Huun, almond stuffed wonders and proverbial last words. There was another reminder, a tale of the prophet Muhammad living for months on water and coarse wheat bread, his wives protesting the austere measures of his faith. Muhammad, who praised honey and had a professed love for cantaloupes, and who once declared "the best meat is that which lines the bones," found in dates the solution he required. To his Arab followers, and to his wives, the fruit was "three skies above luxury," and as indispensable as water and air. I once had this dream of Whitman: I found him under one of the palms on Sherman Way gazing admiring. Though he had seen palms by the Gulf of Mexico, he had never tasted a date. So we drove to a supermarket, and he who had been thoughtful, even dignified, until then, began to sign and moan at the taste of "Araby's sugared dust clouds." When we walked the aisles he insisted on pushing the cart. The frozen foods did not surprise him since his Granny buried potatoes in the cold dirt of her homestead. Still I had to explain tofu, plastic, tacos, and the foods labeled free. He ran his hands caressing the waxed floor; "Smooth as a girl's wrist," he exclaimed. The bright fluorescent lights reminded hirn of the opera, and Walt sang a gravelly tune. The children sitting in carts reached for him, their hands were Lorca's butterflies on his beard. At the cashier he filled pockets with candy, and was shocked by the headlines of our news. Honda, Toyota, Saturn, Oldsmobile— in the parking lot the names waltzed on his tongue. At the fast food stand he ate heartily, the burger's slipperiness amused him, and at his clumsiness we both had a laugh. Then the talk grew quiet, the table stretching like the expanse of time dividing us; I felt he no longer wanted company, having begun to understand our world. Despite his old resentment of Blacks, and now my neighbors, the foreign-born Hispanics and their engines roaring through Balboa and Saticoy, and the Koreans' karoake— the baseline's muffled thuds, voices doused in Canadian Mist, and the off-key pleadings to the lover who never comes—, America remained to him luminous-industrial-fuming- sublime, and as he wished, beyond others' adjectives, beyond what anyone could have conceived. Mumbling a farewell, Whitman stood to leave. And with this my dream ended, Whitman wishing to depart and I holding on to his wrists. All day I wanted to hold his wide wrists. If you drive west of Alexandria your path will run through Alamain, Barani, and Matrouh. Then Egypt will end with a town on a steep hill called Sallum. If you go through the two checkpoints, Libya will unfold its dry pastures for you. On the Sallum hill there is a hotel where people stay to await relatives crossing the border or to hear word if it is safe to return. Across the road a tired bluegreen tea house sits like a bruise permanently on the verge of fading from the prairies' skin. You will also see the money changers— all teenage boys. With their right hands they will wave thick wads of money at your windshield, and with their left they will jostle to give you the best rate. The last time I stayed in Sallum few cars came from either direction, and among the boys fights flared with curses and stones hurled at brows. When the boys' rabble grew loud a man lazily stepped out of the tea house to call them bastards and sons of whores. This went on for hours until the sun settled in the middle of the sky, the boys taking shelter under a torn canvas shed, and the man to the tea house's dusty cool. Then just when all movement and noise seemed to surrender to the September wind and heat, four of the boys broke for a run racing—money still clutched in their hands— to a young date palm in the distance. Pressing shoulders and backs against it, they shook the palm until the season's first fruit began to rain. The other boys joined them, and soon the tea house emptied of the men slouching inside. Those were my brothers who cowered beneath the date palm to gather handfuls of fruit, rubbing each date clean on their sleeves, chewing softly to savor the taste as though it were a good omen, and rising to resume their lives, on their faces the smiles of those who once were blessed.

Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone: the golden and green Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light. What signal from the stars? What senses took it in? What in those wooden motives so decided To strike their leaves, to down their leaves, Rebellion or surrender? and if this Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? What use to learn the lessons taught by time. If a star at any time may tell us:Now.

It is half past ten in Stonington. The trees droop apprehensive of the heat And the sky has turned that pale suspicious colour That means that it cannot support more light. Here on the terrace I and a companion Each pretends to read. The papers say That it is 90 in New York today. Across the street work is going forward On the abominable house that once I fancied, Half, might be mine, and which was in fact the home Of the anonymous couple I used to hear At night arguing in their unhappy bedroom. Now they are throwing out another wing And the site of overlooked love is changed beyond recognition. What will the day, what will the summer bring? Psychic storms or calm productive doldrums? Our neighbours are no saner than ourselves. Perhaps it is time to give the Stones a ring Or to complain of the view from the gallery tower Falling like a shadow across the calm veranda Rich with malice and the threat of accidental meeting. This is not a house but a collection (The largest in private hands?) of sacred objects, A spiritual boutique where anyone, Even the wrecker who had come to spoil, May find himself spending more than he expected On something he cannot quite identify. Here the little horrors become the household gods. For the work of love requires a rule of thumb, Not no laws in particular but its own Whose pseudonym, at least here and now, is pleasure: The morning wasted in work and misquotation, A light but leisurely lunch, then reading Walking or just watching the sun all afternoon Till, hungry, we draw to evening and ombre. Who are we to thank for all of this? The greatest favours are conferred in absence Sometimes, as a syllable gives comfort Dependent on the time and place and person. When pleasure and reality occur Is there room for extra contemplation Or the lyrical promenade? It is enough To know (and this is surely recognition) That the world is spherical and perfect. Now I wish to introduce the copper beech We saw on our walk, English and native here as I am, Whose shade is not the green of contemplation But the imagination’s rich metallic colour Wherein, under libido, we live.

You are a seahorse unraveling. You are the back of a landhorse looking backward. Gotten away form have you thrown yourself racing. Who took what was not out of thunderous shade In an all-knowing sycamore's branches. What who do you make of stone steps you stepped through. You took the boat onto flattened waters. White wall of blue morning fog to slip into. You withstood what is was that was wailing you through. There you were standing on nothing, looking down at two Blackfeathered slashes your two hands held on to. Off were you going aloft would birds such as these take You. Who leaned you and stood you and shook you and shook you.

The catalpa’s white week is ending there in its corner of my yard. It has its arms full of its own flowering now, but the least air spills off a petal and a breeze lets fall whole coronations. There is not much more of what this is. Is every gladness quick? That tree’s a nuisance, really. Long before the summer’s out, its beans, long as a stick, will start to shed. And every year one limb cracks without falling off and hangs there dead till I get up and risk my neck to trim what it knows how to lose but not to shed. I keep it only for this one white pass. The end of June’s its garden; July, its Fall; all else, the world remembering what it was in the seven days of its visible miracle. What should I keep if averages were all?

Out of the nursery and into the garden where it rooted and survived its first hard winter, then a few years of freedom while it blossomed, put out its first tentative branches, withstood the insects and the poisons for insects, developed strange ideas about its height and suffered the pruning of its quirks and clutters, its self-indulgent thrusts and the infighting of stems at cross purposes year after year.  Each April it forgot why it couldn’t do what it had to do, and always after blossoms, fruit, and leaf-fall, was shown once more what simply couldn’t happen. Its oldest branches now, the survivors carved by knife blades, rain, and wind, are sending shoots straight up, blood red, into the light again.

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding On the old road where all that passed are dead, Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding This early May morn when there is none to wed.