38 Trees poems

Her cart like a dugout canoe. Had been an oak trunk. Cut young.      Fire-scoured. What was bark what was heartwood :P u r e   C h a r - H o l e Adze-hacked and gouged. Ever after (never not) wheeling hollow there behind her. Up the hill toward Bennett Yard; down through Eight-Mile, the Narrows. C o m e s   C l a r y   b y   h e r e   n o w Body bent past bent.      Intent upon horizon and carry. Her null eye long since gone isinglassy, opal. —The potent (brimming, fluent) one looks brown. C o u r s e s   C l a r y   s u r e   a s   b a y o u   t h r o u g h   h e r e  n o w Bearing (and borne ahead by) hull and hold behind her. Plies the dark. Whole nights most nights along the overpass over Accabee. C r o s s e s   C l a r y   b l e s s   h e r   b a r r o w   u p   t h e r e   n o w Pausing and voweling there—   the place where the girl fell. (                  ) Afterwhile passing. Comes her cart like a whole-note held.

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds start up again. The crickets, the invisible toad who claims that change is possible, And all the other life too small to name. First one, then another, until innumerable they merge into the single voice of a summer hill. Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour, fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure. And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone can bear to be a stone, the pain the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust. Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill, rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light. The old windmill creaks in perfect time to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass, and the last farmhouse light goes off. Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt these hills and packs of feral dogs. But standing here at night accepts all that. You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon, moving more slowly than the crippled stars, part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls, Part of the grass that answers the wind, part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows there is no silence but when danger comes.

felled 1879 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew — Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being só slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.

When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy's been swinging them. But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves: You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. But I was going to say when Truth broke in With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm I should prefer to have some boy bend them As he went out and in to fetch the cows— Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone. One by one he subdued his father's trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise To the top branches, climbing carefully With the same pains you use to fill a cup Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be. It's when I'm weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig's having lashed across it open. I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better. I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Trees have whole streets of when they were planted plaqued with when the city is to inherit them dead of age almost all at once as if a natural bombing. People see a bill not figured in, a blood red collection come like fall’s leaf due without fail an unseen cost of the design: pale bud and yellow blossom— though seeming little to do this time with tense spring in the window of dead and dying trees’ terms up, with expecting a life by life replacement— not this plague of life’s time as a season across the city. By trial we do, but don’t know how death counts the rings from trees to clocks, species to singled soul at its hour. or on history’s days we all die at once.

The bare tree in february is more beautiful than the full one structure visible each branch exact nothing to hide behind i like things bare at their most themselves

The elm in the town square got dutch elm disease last spring they took it down in sections it was there when my grandparents were married in that square now it's not

The trees here were old before anyone was writing anything down they don't care about that they just kept being trees and we called that survival