We see ourselves in them. We lean on them for classes on how to be more human and what resilience means. They’re our timekeepers, our spiritual guides, our kin.
I spend a substantial amount of time in an old-growth forest awned by bushes older than me by centuries. Bushes beneath which hundreds of different people have walked on toes which might be no extra, carrying their sorrows and their desires in hearts that are actually soil. Bushes which have witnessed world wars and weddings, which were rising since earlier than we constructed the bomb and decoded the human genome, earlier than Einstein dreamt up relativity and Nina Simone dreamt up “Mississippi Goddam,” a few of them alive when Bach was alive.
I usually surprise what they’d say if they may communicate. However maybe they’d say nothing in any respect — maybe they’d communicate a reality past phrases.
That’s what poet Dorianne Laux intimates in her beautiful poem “The Lifetime of Bushes,” present in her assortment Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems (public library) and skim right here to the sound of cellist and composer Zoë Keating’s piece “Optimist” from her transcendent file Into the Trees.
THE LIFE OF TREES
by Dorianne LauxThe pines rub their nice noise
into the spangled darkish, scratch
their itchy boughs in opposition to the home,
and the moan’s thriller interprets roughly
into drudgery of possession: time
to pull the ladder from the shed,
climb onto the roof with a noticed
between my enamel, lower
these suckers down. What’s actuality
if not a protracted exhaustive cringe
from the blade, the enamel? I wish to sleep
and dream the lifetime of bushes, beings
from the muted world who care
nothing for Cash, Politics, Energy,
Will or Proper, who need little from the evening
however a couple of lifeless stars going dim, a white owl
lifting from their limbs, who need solely
to sink their roots into the moist floor
and terrify the worms or shake
their bleary heads like trend fashions
or previous hippies. If bushes may communicate
they wouldn’t, solely hum some low
inexperienced observe, roll their pinecones
down the empty streets and blame it,
with a shrug, on the chilly wind.
In the course of the day they sleep inside
their furry bark, clouds shredding
like historic lace above their crowns.
Solar. Rain. Snow. Wind. They concern
nothing however the Hurricane, and Hearth,
that whipped bully who rises up
and turns into his personal lifeless father.
Within the storms the younger ones
bend and bend and the previous know
they might not make it, go down
with the ability strains sparking,
damaged on the trunk. They fling
their branches, forked sacrifice
to the crushed earth. They don’t pray.
In the event that they make a sound it’s eaten
by the wind. And although the celebrities
return they don’t provide thanks, solely
ooze a sticky sap from their roundish
concentric wounds, straighten their spines
and breathe, and breathe once more.
Complement with Mary Oliver’s poem “When I Am Among the Trees” and Helene Johnson’s “Trees at Night,” then revisit Hermann Hesse’s poetic century-old love letter to trees.
