Number 65


 

A Felled Tree


more is lost

than is wood

lying there

not a tree


treeness goes

like the rippling soul

of someone dying

an animal dying

a bird


what you can see now

on this fresh cutting

beneath the advent

of its new moldering

is the press of time

sending up grief


Gary Michael Dault

March 12, 2021


Number 64


 


In The Wood


In the wood!  In the wood!

Where the great green trees rustle

rustle without end.

The great green trees.

The gold-green trees of hair

in which the sunlight flashes

hangs heavy with dreams.

Shake Green One shake

thus!

Even now dreams are sinking

like heavy red wine

into me


(1903)


Jean (Hans) Arp in R.W.Last, Hans

Arp, The Poet of Dadaism (Dufour Editions, 1969),

p.69.


Number 63


 

I didn't know about English actress Judi Dench's love for trees until accidentally coming upon this exquisite BBC One video, "My Passion for Trees" a few days ago on YouTube.  It was filmed in 2017, when Dench was eighty-two (she is still going strong now at age 86).


Here is the link:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjnv_AevX4s


In addition to her splendid work in such films as The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, Tea with Mussolini, The Importance of Being Earnest, Shakespeare in Love, and the recent Victoria and Abdul, it's worth mentioning here, for those of us who love the music of Stephen Sondheim, that on BBC Proms 2010, Dench gave what is surely the definitive performance of "Send in the Clowns" from Sondheim's A Little Night Music.  It's available on YouTube as well.


Number 62


 Tree


You tree

of company--


here

shadowed branches,


small,

twisted comfortably


your size,

reddish buds' clusters--


all of

you I love


here

by the simple river.


Robert Creeley, "Tree" from Windows (New York:

New Directions, 1990), p. 13.  

Number 61


 

Recently my next-door friend got a new computer and consequently bestowed on me her older one--so now I have my own email address.  Gary and I immediately began corresponding from room to room, which gives us both much pleasure. 

Yesterday, when I looked at my messages, I found this from Gary about his current reading in the works of Emile Zola (specifically, The Masterpiece): " If anyone should ask why I read Zola (and nobody will)," he wrote to me, "I'd point to writing like this:  "...Willows, along both river-banks, trailed their pale heads in their own reflections."

Gary tells me that he simply didn't expect such lyricism from so committed a naturalist writer as Zola..

Number 60


 

Yesterday evening

I returned with the clouds

drifting under the rosebushes

(great, round tenderness)

among the faithful tree trunks.


The solitude was eternal

and the silence never-ending.

I stood still like a tree

and listened to trees talking.


From "Men Trees" in Three Hundred Poems, 1903-1953, by Juan Ramon Jimenez (Austin:

University of Texas Press, n.d.), p. 201 


Number 59


 


A tree

like a rose

can reclothe

a threadbare soul