I want to see a tree, a tree, I’ll go mad if I don’t see a tree, the chief of baggage tells the writer-in-residence at Heathrow.
*
Something singing right at dusk; I go out to listen. I’d hoped it might have been a saw-whet owl, but it turns out to be a distant ambulance. Needless to say, hardly anyone whets saw blades anymore.
*
It’s staggering to realize that the great eastern forest was completely cut over without the use of chainsaws or skidders. All those axes! All those railroad lines snaking through the mountains! And the men cursing the trees in Italian, in Polish, in Czeck, in Hungarian, in English, in German, in Serbo-Croatian… Trees that were too massive for the sawmill were blown apart with dynamite and left to rot.
*
Learning to read the forest involves mastering a language of absence. The tree standing on a colonnade of roots preserves the shape of the stump on which it sprouted. On rocky ridgetops, a ring of boulders might mark the spot where an American chestnut once stood. Pits and mounds throughout the forest signal the violent overthrow of giants.
*
The words beautiful elephant come into my head. I open the anthology in my hand to a poem called “The Death of an Elephant.”
*
Mushrooms as colorful as unclaimed luggage. The elder tree turns a thousand dark eyes toward the earth.
Several times a year, a black rat snake climbs the black walnut tree out back to get in my house and eat the rodents, for which I’m grateful. This video poem depicts its latest entrance.
(Transcript)
We were just talking about you crooked tunnel
the way you funnel your long freight up the walnut tree serpent
& glide out along one diminishing limb until you reach the roof
drop into the gutter & loop into a squirrel hole above the kitchen
We’d just found one of your old skins snagged on a thorn
I don’t think he’s coming back for it I joked
And my neighbor glances up into the tree & says
Well there he is now
And there you were son of a bitch
still & heavy as a tongue with bad news
waiting for a signal neither of us caught
to set you back into motion into path into limbless dragon
flicking your soft Y of flame
*
Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts and photosets to the Festival of the Trees blog carnival, which next month will be hosted for the first time by an India-based blog, Trees, Plants, and more. Details on how to submit are here.
Subscribers must click through, or visit the video page.
Transcript:
I went to the woods to live haphazardly, from hand to mouth, marching like an army on my stomach. The path travels through me like a wave, like a particle. I’ve learned nothing, & am much the better for it — the forest teaches by confounding expectations. The bright orange of an eft, like the hair of a punk rocker, says: leave me alone. The spots on a fawn are a map to a country that doesn’t want to be found. The sun doesn’t move there, trapped in a net of trees. A hen turkey clucks not to lead her chicks, who disguise themselves as stones & vanish, but to lead me, her sudden unwanted charge — to draw me away. Which might turn out to be exactly where I was going.
***
Speaking of forests, be sure to visit the June edition of the Festival of the Trees at Roundrock Journal. And for many more creepy-crawlies like the millipede in the video, check out the latest Circus of the Spineless, the blog carnival for invertebrates and the people who love them.
***
I learned something about making poetry videos today: the addition of music can mean the difference between success and failure.
*
I’m always excited to see other poet-bloggers making videos. Ren Powell recently launched a second blog to showcase her terrific poem animations, AnimaPoetics. I’m sure I’ll link to most of her videos at Moving Poems eventually, but do check out her site in the meantime. She’s posting new videos at the rate of roughly one a week.
After dark, when the woods
turn back into a forest,
go stand under an umbrella
& let your prim column
of not-rain become
as anonymous as the others.
Count the drips until you lose
track of everything else.
Inhale the fertile aroma
of log-rot & truffle
as if it were the freshest tea.
Ignore the lightning flash,
what it does to the ground:
a stark here-&-now
of sticks & leaves into which
it no longer seems possible
to sink. Raise your face
to the false vault of ribs.
The first azaleas are just beginning to bloom, with the usual
profusion of scent that would put a hooker to shame.
But who eulogizes the odorless oak blossoms, those caterpillars
in need of a spam-mail cure for erectile dysfunction?
The white locks of the bridal wreath bush are perkier by far,
tossing in the wind. I’m worried that if this cool, damp weather
persists, we might see another autumn without acorns.
Between rains, the carpenter bees come out to give my house
a thorough inspection. I’m reading about the convergent habits
of certain perennial wildflowers & a few species of walking sticks,
both of which make their seeds or eggs into fast-food bait for ants,
gambling that the ants will throw the inedible portions, packed
with their embryonic offspring, into the mother-warm midden.
How did slow-growing early bloomers & tree-eating sticks
both learn to exploit this bug? I gaze at the greening woods,
as I do so often, for clues of the original template — the once-
towering tulip poplars, white pines, American chestnuts. It’s like
trying to picture the naked body of a woman I’ve never met.
The Cooper’s hawks nesting half-way up the ridge emit
what we’d call chirps if they were songbirds
or notes of affliction if they were electronic angels,
placed for surveillance purposes among the crowd of leaves
cautiously exposing themselves to the rumored sun.
A red blur goes past: the throat of a hummingbird
hell-bent on drinking from some pink, inverted cup.
The last cattails lose their upholstery
in shadblow time
Men in camouflage work their turkey calls
in shadblow time
I found a flattened snake curled like an ampersand
in shadblow time
I read about the army interrogator who put a bullet through her head
in shadblow time
The world first learned about Abu Ghraib
in shadblow time Oh sweet Canada Canada Canada sings the white-throated sparrow
in shadblow time
The shocking red of the first tanager
in shadblow time
The talk shows were full of rage
in shadblow time
***
Shadblow, also known as shadbush, Juneberry, sarvis, and serviceberry, is a small tree in the Amelanchier genus native to the woodlands of eastern North America. It can be hard to identify due to hybridization between species: primarily A. arborea, A. humilis, and A. canadensis. It is one of the first native trees to flower in the spring, producing delicious fruit in early summer that tastes like a cross between blueberries and cherries. In Plummer’s Hollow, as in much of the folded Appalachians, it seems fondest of the most acid, rockiest soils, growing as a spottily abundant member of the chestnut oak – red oak – pitch pine – mountain laurel forest type.
Tomorrow is the last day to submit links for the next Festival of the Trees, which will feature posts on flowering trees.
Turn up the lights on the hominid pen.
It’s feeding time, though some
don’t even know they’re hungry.
You can give them each
a slice of manna if you like.
See the one who squats in the crotch
of that tree? Almost since birth
he’s exiled himself from the ground.
Unlike the others, he seems to realize
something here is missing—
a grotesque sensitivity that makes him
a wolf in this wood, this tree
he clings to like a mother.
When the wind agitates its leaves
he hugs himself & rocks
back & forth, moaning.
Unlike the others who gibber with awe,
he wants nothing to do with us,
& recoils from your face
as if from a stone that the river
never learned how to read.
But see how his tree glows
in this lurid light, like a harp
rearing above a dark-suited orchestra?
Someday soon we will reunite it
with its former companions,
that whole forest enjoying
eternal life: value-added products
of our loving care.
*** UPDATE: Marly Youmans‘ series of five poems in response to paintings by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (including “The Man who Lived in a Tree”) are now live on his website. Go look.
It sat down in my pool.
Swayed like a sapling.
Spoke to me in its dreams,
which were as plush as truffles
fruiting in the dark.
Luna, it said, Luna— as if I
were its pale progenitor.
Others of its kind boiled in & out
like tiny, earth-bound storms,
chewing with a fury,
& my cousins shook the mountain
when they came down.
My strange familiar clung to me
with its naked forelimbs & howled.
It had one short root with which
it communicated to others
of its kind, reaching through
the air somehow.
Where did it go, that larva?
Did it ever manage to spin
a real cocoon?
Submissions for the next edition of the Festival of the Trees are due Monday — March 30. Details here.
A foreign bird sang
in a foreign accent
too thick for anything but the sound
of spitting: puh puhpuh puh puh.
A new mouth had blossomed
in my chest, round and wet
with astonishment, & I wanted
nothing more than to lie back in
the sturdy arms of my captain & have
a heart-to-heart talk with the sun.
Where was I? What did I need
this stick for, so far from any ground?
I let it fall. I would be an epiphyte now —
my fancy boots & spiked helmet
already dangled well enough for roots.
I let out the breath I’d been holding
for so long, thinking its true owner
would return to claim it. Above me
in ragged ranks the whole village
turned out again
to wave & wave. Photo link (public domain)
***
Don’t forget to visit Festival of the Trees 33. I hate to play favorites, but I do think this is one of the most varied and interesting editions to date. Highlights for me included a gallery of silo trees, an illustrated essay on tree asters, and a detailed account of one couple’s adventures learning to climb trees with ropes just like the people in Richard Preston’s book, The Wild Trees.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Porcupine,
do the sapless twigs of winter
taste any different on the tree
you’ve just girdled,
this waste of a pine?
Its whited branches light
the grove like candles,
like candelsticks.
But you with your poor eyesight
must favor the dark: hollows & cavities,
the undersides of things,
unchewed bark.
This pine was unwise to arm itself
with such soft & succulent spines.
It did nothing but hiss
like a gnawed-on road-salted tire.
Slow destroyer,
do you ever pass
those bleached roads in the air
& long for salt?
Think of the North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) as a really fat, irritable, slow-moving squirrel. (The irritable part isn’t absolutely certain, but that’s the gist of the genus name, Erithizon.) Like squirrels, porcupines are rodents at home in the trees, with an affinity also for subterranean excavations. But while tree squirrels have evolved to eat and hoard nuts, porcupines are attuned to the leaves, twigs, and bark of trees. On our mountain, they seem fondest of conifers (hemlock, white pine, and Norway spruce), chestnut oaks, elms, and fruit trees, roughly in that order, but we’ve seen them in other trees as well. In warmer months, they may graze on herbaceous plants — there’s little that’s consistent about porcupines. Though generally nocturnal, you can find them out in the middle of a sunny day, too. I suspect they don’t always sleep too well. I hear them moving around under the floor at all hours.
For creatures that spend so much of their time in trees, porcupines have remarkably poor vision, relying instead primarily on their sense of smell and hearing. They certainly don’t look like they belong in the trees, especially when they climb out on a thin branch that bends under their weight. Watching this one today made me think of a trained bear on a unicycle — it just didn’t look natural. But their claws and the rough soles of their feet, together with their tails, seem more than adequate to any arboreal challenge.
I’ve often half-jokingly referred to them as my totem animal, but I don’t think I’m quite as strange as a porcupine — at least, not yet. Porcupines are legendary for their taste for salt, and have been known to eat tool handles, boots, snowshoes, or automobile tires encrusted with road salt. They also sometimes take a shine to radiator hoses and brake linings, and the glues in plywood are like porcupine crack.
Porcupines are fond of the dark insides of things, be they hollow trees, logs, or rock shelters, and will on occasion share sufficiently large shelters with other porcupines, each keeping a studious distance from the others. Though they’re quiet much of the time, they can make a lot of different noises when irritated or aroused. Mating season — late summer and early fall — brings out their full repertoire of coughs, grunts, whines, wails, and moans. Love-struck male porcupines are also said to perform elaborate dances, culminating in a spray of urine over the head of the female.
That may sound a little bizarre, but let’s face it: we’re talking about creatures who are fiercely solitary for most of their existence, and who spend way more time communing with the wind in the treetops than with others of their own kind. Oh, and there’s the matter of the 30,000 hollow barbed quills covering their bodies. That should be enough to make almost anyone a little strange, one would think.
Believe it or not, though, a coat of easily removable quills is a practical enough defensive strategy to have evolved twice. New World and Old World porcupines, like New World and Old World vultures, are not closely related, and resemble each other because of convergent evolution. It would be nice to say that similar ecological niches summoned them into existence — which was the case with vultures — but in fact it is only the New World porcupines that have a close affinity with trees. Many South American species actually have prehensile tails.
Porcupines have two main enemies here in Pennsylvania: people, and the large weasels known as fishers, which are quick enough to dart in, flip them over, and attack their unprotected bellies before they can react. We’ve found a number of dead porcupines around the mountain since the return of the formerly extirpated, reintroduced fishers some five years ago, though it’s possible that bobcats have also killed a few. Fishers are just as solitary as porcupines, and have huge territories, so the death of a fisher two weeks ago on a small road a half-mile from the base of the mountain was probably very good news for our porcupine population — and bad news for the trees that, for whatever reason, have the misfortune of attracting porcupines year after year.
The poor eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) in the above video is one such tree. It’s one of the few hemlocks in the upper half of the hollow, and as such gets more than its fair share of attention from the conifer-loving porcupines. It’s undergone such radical pruning over the last couple of decades, I’m amazed it’s still alive, but hemlocks can take a long time to decide to cash in their chips. They’re not, however, the sort of tree to sprout a bunch of new branches in response to pruning, so this particular tree has simply become more and more skeletal, with vestigial tufts of needle-bearing twigs at the ends of most of its branches. Judging from the appetite of the porcupine I watched feasting on it today, this winter might well be its last. Porcupines can consume up to a pound of cellulose a day. This is said, by the way, to make them smell like old sawdust, though I admit I’ve never gotten quite close enough to one of them to see if that’s true.
*
Don’t forget to submit tree-related posts to the February 1 edition of the Festival of the Trees by January 30. Here’s the call for submissions. Ash laments that he has yet to receive any bark rubbings.
I hope your mother’s heart has settled
& ceased its flutter. I’d like to add
some wish about hearts in general
in this time of rage & sadness,
but I’m not sure poets should perpetuate
such outdated metaphysics about
a thing that turns out to be little more
than an organ, a nest of fat roots
that can be transplanted like a tree
from one body to another, even
across species lines.
I am still agog at this, recalling
my Great Aunt Thera’s pride & wonder
as a former farm girl that she owed
her last years of life to a sacrificial pig.
If there’s a soul, then, I wonder
where it might sit?
I picture a yellow canary flitting
anxiously from perch to perch as
its cage travels deeper into the mine.
I picture the trees our primate bodies
evolved to navigate, their ladders,
their heartwood neither alive
nor clearly dead. I remember
the blossoming branches of a wild
sweet cherry tree one spring,
after an ice storm had toppled it
& a chainsaw had severed the trunk
from the tangle of roots and soil.
Even decapitated, it bloomed with abandon,
it bloomed as if there were no tomorrow:
clouds of white against the brown woods.
The wasps & bees didn’t seem
to know the difference, & surely
their grubs grew just as fat
on that deathless honey.
I have no answers, & am afraid
for those who do. The Aztecs
suffered no shortage of poets, all
wringing their hands at the sweet
ephemerality of life. Their stock
metaphor for a heart was a blossom,
& the chest cavity of a human being
was the sacred ground over which
they fought their wars.
What have we learned?
The Holy Land itself has been vivisected
into slivers that can’t survive in isolation.
Broken sewers on one side of the wall
mean poisoned wells on the other,
& blood spilled in one place
travels who knows how far
through the imperilled veins
of a single subterranean heart.
Festival of the Trees #31, the New Year’s 2009 edition, is worth an extended visit at Rock Paper Lizard. As Hugh says, ’tis the season to take down the Christmas tree — something we just got around to doing this morning up at my parents’ house. Dad kindly undecorated the tree, leaving me with the simpler task of carrying it outside.
If you feed wild birds, discarded Christmas trees make very useful shelters from hawks and inclement weather. I nestled this year’s tree among the skeletons of previous Christmases, four of them, in varying stages of decomposition. Even without the needles, thin, tangled coats of weeds and grasses still offer some protection. The Christmas tree is truly a gift that goes on giving. When I came back with my camera to snap the above picture less than five minutes later, a half-dozen white-throated sparrows flew out. No sooner had it been stripped of the usual myriad of fake bird ornaments than the real thing moved in.
*
I’ve just been reading about TreeYoga. I got all excited at first, but it turned out that this was really boring old PeopleYoga — the trees are merely used for a form of non-lethal hanging.
As in the yoga posture (asana) of the Tree Pose (Vrksasana), TreeYoga beckons us to reflect upon a core principle of yoga — balance. Like trees, yogis can now root themselves into the earth and extend gloriously up to the sky. There is great beauty and playfulness in the flowering shapes of yogis sprouting from trees.
If the accompanying photos are any indication, the dangling yogis do indeed resemble some kind of strange fruit. The official TreeYoga website refers to trees as “yoga partners,” which strikes me as presumptuous in the same way I find tree-hugging presumptuous: how do we know the trees really want to be hugged or enlisted as partners?
Still, people have been meditating in or under trees for a very long time, and as I’ve written here in the past, many Central Pennsylvanians practice an annual tree-based meditative activity that probably resembles quite closely the paleolithic, ancestral form of meditation. And because they spend such long hours up there, staying as still as they can, they’re rewarded with all sorts of great wildlife sightings. One of the hunters on our property saw a bobcat from her tree stand this year; another saw a fisher. There were several red fox sightings, which surprised us a little because we haven’t seen any in two or three years, and had assumed they’d all been killed or driven off by the coyotes. And quite regularly of course the hunters draw the attention of small flocks of winter birds. I can only imagine a chickadee’s reaction if it saw a human hanging upside-down, chickadee-fashion, with the help of a TreeYoga swing.
The deer hunter is an orange dot
among the trees on the hillside
from where his teenage son sits
in their bright red pickup, running
the engine to thaw out his toes.
There’s a spot in the otherwise
uniformly white sky that’s too bright
to look at. A red-bellied woodpecker
taps, listens, taps — a surgeon
tending to whatever succulent
parasites infect a tree. The deer
have left the melted semicircles
where they slept & their soft
brown eyes & beautiful muzzles
are now bent on finding their daily
five pounds of twigs & tree seedlings,
converting the forest of the future
into flesh & excrement. Day Six
of rifle season & they’ve turned
wild again, like any hunted thing.
In the field, the shadows of dried brome
are so faint, you’d never see them
if they weren’t trembling
in every curled extremity.
***
The latest edition of the Festival of the Trees is up at A Neotropical Savanna, after a delay occasioned by the loss of internet service (something I can relate to). Go look.
Also, I encouraged Dana Guthrie Martin to post her statement of purpose as a poet, which she drew up as part of the MFA submissions process. It’s one of the best personal manifestos I’ve ever read, and now it has me thinking maybe I should attempt something similar. If you were to write a statement of purpose — as a writer, as a blogger, as a human being — what would it say? How would you justify what you do, or don’t do?
I'm Dave Bonta, a poet and literary magazine editor from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!
Order from the press or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
Pharyngula Everything is fluid. Biology isn't about fixed and rigidly invariant processes — it's about squishy, dynamic, and interactive stuff making do.
Fragments from Floyd
Today, 92% of new American homes are air-conditioned, and most of the electricity to produce our cool air comes at the expense of Appalachian mountaintop coal, hence the paradox: greater indoor climate control contributes to an outdoor climate out of control.
Coyote Crossing
Worship isn't love. It's more like hatred. People worship you, they expect things in return for that worship. Handholding.
The Storialist
You are cautious
on your off day, creeping up to examine
your own moves and motives. Better to
hang back, wary, a dog sniffing at a stranger.
small change
I wish our hearts came equipped with their own larynx.
A boom box for the murmur of the eddy-riddled river.
The Rag and Bone Shop
There are people of river and
grass, and there are people of
concrete and glass.
Rosefire Rising
There is a memory of having been a mountain, complete with irony and the assumption of youthful arrogance, a sense of wholeness we did not recognize until it was lost. Once we are broken, it opens so many perspectives...
Connaissances
My family were now alone in the cathedral as she sang to us, her lovely singing filling the vast echoey space. Her impromptu performance consisted of devotional songs which she had learnt this year before going on a choir tour in Belgium. The sound took on an immense physicality as it bounded out into the great amplifying chamber and reverberated back at varying intervals from the different enclaves of the church.
"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
