I remembered the trees again. Not
forest furniture, or landmark, or
let’s sit in the shade, just
Douglas firs, standing there,
as they do--
it’s weirdly easy to forget them.
Even the big ones.
Especially the big ones,
that rise like architecture,
holding up nothing
but canopy so high
you don’t notice it’s there.
Column, body, torso, trunk:
scabby bark I want to say five feet,
six feet wide—but I don’t know for sure
how big they are. One hundred,
two hundred, three
hundred feet high: I don’t know why
I want to establish this kind of
precision. Maybe because
walking by on the path
the path can become everything
that matters to your feet
and you walk with everything
you carry in your head, the arguments, the injury,
the dead bees in their box,
the box with nothing in it, wondering
if a compassionate mind
is really boundless, and what is boundless,
anyway? I think of the clay tile my mother sent me,
made by me when I was six
or seven, a smiling whale
I don’t remember making
held in a rectangle
of sea and sky, and my
printed name, the brand new
art of it, an e such as I
have rarely made so neatly since,
and the l’s lined up
on the other side
of the whale’s wide mouth and its cloud
of bubbles as if whale or sea
were pronouncing the sounds of me--
The y is smaller than the rest, to keep its tail
from getting lost. This way it stays
with the others, stays in the realm of names
and does not dissolve into
the realm of water. I love
the y the most, tucked up
like it comes from somewhere
else, like it knows something
the others have never
had to consider. Over and over
I catch myself wanting some old
comfort to remain or return or
resolve like a story with a good ending,
but here is the path through the trees--
and maybe you do glance at a shape to the side:
Wow. Big. You nod in approval as you go by.
Or maybe you slow, stop, look up:
the top of the tree is moving
in wind that stays high,
running its own river up there,
and the branches, dark green
feathered wings, swimming, swaying,
not breaking, the wind moving the tree, the tree being
what it is in the wind.
I don’t know all of it, I never will,
but this is when I remember to feel it:
we walk among peaceful giants, and they are alive.
The earth rises up in silent, gentle beings.
And when they fall, three hundred, four hundred,
five hundred years crack open, because
we know how to think it, because
we can hold an idea in one hand
and memory in the other. Sometimes
the roots tear in the falling and the tree
becomes its own sarcophagus. Or a bed
for whatever grows next. Sometimes
enough root remains rooted in earth that the fallen
reaches a limb skyward and this becomes
the new vertical, the new
tree-thought. From the shattered,
new shoots. Soft. Not tentative, but tender.
I could say this is not a metaphor,
just fact: let the trees be what they are.
New branches, not always, but sometimes.
Singing out of the dead land.
What I might have thought was dead land.
I move among the lives of trees.
forest furniture, or landmark, or
let’s sit in the shade, just
Douglas firs, standing there,
as they do--
it’s weirdly easy to forget them.
Even the big ones.
Especially the big ones,
that rise like architecture,
holding up nothing
but canopy so high
you don’t notice it’s there.
Column, body, torso, trunk:
scabby bark I want to say five feet,
six feet wide—but I don’t know for sure
how big they are. One hundred,
two hundred, three
hundred feet high: I don’t know why
I want to establish this kind of
precision. Maybe because
walking by on the path
the path can become everything
that matters to your feet
and you walk with everything
you carry in your head, the arguments, the injury,
the dead bees in their box,
the box with nothing in it, wondering
if a compassionate mind
is really boundless, and what is boundless,
anyway? I think of the clay tile my mother sent me,
made by me when I was six
or seven, a smiling whale
I don’t remember making
held in a rectangle
of sea and sky, and my
printed name, the brand new
art of it, an e such as I
have rarely made so neatly since,
and the l’s lined up
on the other side
of the whale’s wide mouth and its cloud
of bubbles as if whale or sea
were pronouncing the sounds of me--
The y is smaller than the rest, to keep its tail
from getting lost. This way it stays
with the others, stays in the realm of names
and does not dissolve into
the realm of water. I love
the y the most, tucked up
like it comes from somewhere
else, like it knows something
the others have never
had to consider. Over and over
I catch myself wanting some old
comfort to remain or return or
resolve like a story with a good ending,
but here is the path through the trees--
and maybe you do glance at a shape to the side:
Wow. Big. You nod in approval as you go by.
Or maybe you slow, stop, look up:
the top of the tree is moving
in wind that stays high,
running its own river up there,
and the branches, dark green
feathered wings, swimming, swaying,
not breaking, the wind moving the tree, the tree being
what it is in the wind.
I don’t know all of it, I never will,
but this is when I remember to feel it:
we walk among peaceful giants, and they are alive.
The earth rises up in silent, gentle beings.
And when they fall, three hundred, four hundred,
five hundred years crack open, because
we know how to think it, because
we can hold an idea in one hand
and memory in the other. Sometimes
the roots tear in the falling and the tree
becomes its own sarcophagus. Or a bed
for whatever grows next. Sometimes
enough root remains rooted in earth that the fallen
reaches a limb skyward and this becomes
the new vertical, the new
tree-thought. From the shattered,
new shoots. Soft. Not tentative, but tender.
I could say this is not a metaphor,
just fact: let the trees be what they are.
New branches, not always, but sometimes.
Singing out of the dead land.
What I might have thought was dead land.
I move among the lives of trees.
|
Kelly Terwilliger is the author of two collections of poetry, A Glimpse of Oranges and Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key. A new chapbook, Night Maps, is forthcoming. Her work has appeared in journals such as december magazine, Main Street Rag, and Cider Press Review. She teaches and performs as an oral storyteller in public schools in Eugene, Oregon, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, an occasional bear, and lots of deer.
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