Number 54

 

A few days ago, two friends of ours--John Kuti and Lynn A'Court-- sent us a link (see below) that transported us to the peace of the world's forests--a handsome gift!

By going to tree.fm ("Tune into forests from around the world"), you can visit (and listen to) places you're unlikely to get to anytime soon: forests in Estonia, Norway, China, Spain, Russia, Portugal, Romania and many more.

The visual lushness available on Tree.fm reminded me of the Polish forests I used to love walking in with my family.  The photograph posted here is of the  woods near the village of Raszowka, where my mother lives.

> https://www.tree.fm/forest/27

Number 53

 

Unlike the young tree, which longs to grow beyond

itself, an old tree resigns itself to being what it now is.

Number 52

 

"All trees in the world are journeying somewhere.

Perpetual pilgrimage."

                                     ----Vladimir Nabokov, "Gods" in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 45

Number 51

 

I was just beginning to think about a weekly tree, when Gary drew my attention to a book he loves and was now reading for the second time--Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Flight To Arras from 1942.  

He reminded me that while Saint-Ex (as Gary refers to him affectionately) is best known as the author-illustrator of The Little Prince, his far greater achievement lies in his brilliant novels about his life as a pilot--especially as a fighter pilot in his Flight To Arras, a book my husband has always regarded as both the greatest anti-war novel and the greatest anti-bureaucratic novel ever written. 

"Listen," he said this morning, "this is the kind of thing Saint-Ex thinks while flying at 30,000 feet over enemy territory," and he read me following:

"There is a serenity that is higher than the pronouncements of the intelligence.  There is a thing which pierces and governs us and which cannot be grasped by the intelligence. 

A tree has no language.  We are a tree.  There are truths which are evident, though not put into words...."

Number 50

 

When a tree becomes old and stops expanding, it turns

towards a more interior life.

Number 49

 

Lovers in Winter

The posture of the tree

        Shows the prevailing wind;

And ours, long misery

         When you are long unkind.

But forward, look, we lean--

          Not backward as in doubt--

And still with branches green

          Ride our ill weather out.

--Robert Graves, "Lovers in Winter" in Collected

Poems 1965 (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 152.

Number 48

 

"Though a human being is 'chemically speaking...a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of fig-leaf,' still, said Pound, we have our thoughts within us, 'as the thought of a tree is in the seed'."

                                 Hugh Kenner on Ezra Pound in Kenner's book, The Elsewhere Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.40.

Number 47

 " (I recall how) Joe Bousquet expressed the intimate space

of a tree: 'Space is nowhere.  Space is inside it like honey in a

hive'." 

                        --Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 202. 

Number 46

 Forget the tube of bark,

Alliterative leaves,

Tenacious like a hand,

Gnarled rootage in the dark

Interior of land.

Bright incidental bird

Whose melody is fanned

Among the bundled sheaves,

Wild spool of the winding word,

Reject: and let there be

Only tree.

--From Stanley Kunitz, "Very Tree" in The Collected Poems (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,  2000), p. 31.

Number 45

 

I like sitting at the foot of an old tree, above its

teeming roots.

Number 44

 

Gary, who is fond of the poetry of the late George Oppen (1908-1984), brought me this--from a notice by critic High Kenner, written the year Oppen died.

"The things he sees," wrote Carl Rakosi [a poet-friend of Oppen's]

"feels like the gnarled bark of an oak tree.  The tree is there, too. You can put your weight against it.  It won't give,"

Number 43

 

In an essay in The Crowning Privilege (1955), poet Robert Graves  spends some time in praise of American modernist poet, e.e.cummings--an unlikely enthusiasm for Graves, the arch classicist and poetic mythologist.  Amusingly, Graves praises cummings for being unabashed "to write, endite and publicly recite so intrinsically corny a sonnet as the one beginning":

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue dream of sky  and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Number 42

 

In 1965, American art critic James Lord published a small book called A Giacometti Portrait.  It was an account of his agreeing to sit for a portrait by Alberto Giacometti,  a portrait the artist assured him  would take only a couple of hours to complete.  In fact, the work took weeks and weeks and was never really finished.

In 2018, actor/director Stanley Tucci made an intimate and exquisite film of Lord's book.

He cast Geoffrey Rush as Giacometti (the actor looks astonishingly like the artist) and  Armie Hammer as James Lord.

In the course of one of their many walks--this time through a Paris cemetery--Giacometti,  gazing at the trees overhead, asks Lord an important question: 

Giacometti:  Have you ever wanted to be a tree?

Lord:  No. 

Number 40

 

In Robert Lowell's Notebook (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), there is a poem called "Searchings" which contains the line "I like the trees, because I can never be at their eye-level...."

At first I knew what that meant.  Right now I'm not so sure.

Number 39

 

In time a tree gains beauty along with its increasing vulnerability.

Number 38

 

     Gary called me from his study yesterday afternoon.  When I got there, he was typing with one hand and waving a book around--like a signal flag--with the other

     "I think I've found you a tree poem," he said.

     "That's nice.  Where was it?"

     "In a very unlikely place," he told me.  "It's one of Ted Berrigan's sonnets!" 

     Ted Berrigan? 

     Ted Berrigan published his now famous suite of sonnets in 1964 to much acclaim, after which it virtually disappeared until this new Penguin edition from 2000, edited by his wife, poet Alice Notley.  Berrigan (1934-1983) was one of those deliberately difficult poets, whose works, if you are in an ungenerous frame of mind, may seem off-puttingly opaque, even hopelessly incoherent.  A Berrigan sonnet can contain lines like "The blue day! In the air the winds dance / Now our own children are strangled down in the bubbling quadrangle./ To thicken!" (Sonnet XXXll).

     "Isn't Ted Berrigan a bit...um...demanding for the tree column?"

     "Not this time," said Gary, full of missionary zeal.

     And he was right.  Here is Berrigan's Sonnet XVll (for Carol Clifford):

Each tree stands alone in stillness

After many years still nothing

The wind's wish is the tree's demand

The tree stands still

The wind walks up and down

Scanning the long selves of the shore

Her aimlessness is the pulse of the tree

It beats in tiny blots

It's patternless pattern of excitement

Letters     birds     beggars     books

There is no such thing as a breakdown

The tree     the ground     the wind     these are

Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits

Sensual, solid, still, swaying alone in the wind          

Number 37

 

Trees breathe for any

who breathe to live

Margaret Avison, from "Two" in Concrete and Wild Carrot (London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2002), p. 59.

Number 36

 

I'm reading sculptor Louise Nevelson's book, Dawn + Dusk (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), assembled from taped conversations by her assistant, Diana MacKown.  I've been admiring Nevelson's shaping imagination and her larger-than-life energies.  What is so invigorating about her is her immense desire for and will to work.  

There is a page in the book showing a hand-written note on a scrap of paper that reads, quite remarkably, "Walk with a Leaf."   

Number 35

 

Lately, our house breathes poetry.  Gary has always written poems, but now he dreams them as well.  He reads and writes through the night.  The subtle light of a table lamp burns till morning comes.

There are poems, new ones as well as old ones, piling up everywhere:  on the coffee tables, sofas, chests, on the beds and under them, on the staircases and strewn on benches in the garden.  Only today I stepped on a poem, which happened to be about a tree. Here it is:

Venerable Tree

the tree of many weathers

stands black as an umbrella

arching over the beasts 

of our neighborhood

it has stood there

since the earth was round

before the sky

was sliced open

to reveal

weathered stars 

Number 34

 

To lose oneself in a tree, to seek its solitude....

Number 33

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?  No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

                   --from Philip Larkin, The Trees.

Number 32

"A single tree--what a miracle it is!"
                                                ---Pablo Casals

Number 31

     There is a book Gary has been trying to get me to read for fifteen years.  I've finally come to it and it is a delight. 
     The book is by W.J.C. Murray and is a scruffy little volume published in England in 1954 by The Country Book Club.
     It's called A Sanctuary Planted and it recounts how, beginning while The Battle of Britain flashed and screamed overhead, Murray began turning a few acres of land in Sussex into a Sanctuary--almost as retaliation for the war.  The sanctuary would be home to all of the trees, shrubs, flowers, animals, birds and insects Murray could collect or otherwise encourage to live and thrive in his hallowed place.
     Trees were of great importance to him.
     He writes that for him, the meaning of a tree is "permanence of place, constancy in being, the destiny to stand and serve, to rest in massive strength, to stand and wait, to endure to the end, unmoved, to abide undaunted through all frosts and storms, rains and tempest, light and darkness, year by year, century by century...."

Number 30

The bark of an old tree is as mysterious as fog

Number 29

In her diary for  December 1, 1151, the German mystic, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), noted that an ancient tree outside her casement window suddenly "began physically to move in the quiet light of midday.  It's motion," she wrote, "seemed such that I and everything I knew or could imagine was present in that tree and shared the same fluid, energetic breathing.  The privileged glimpse was gone in a moment, though I have no doubt the joyous movement continues still.  I crave its beauty like food...."
                                --Barbara Lachman, The Journal of Hildegard of Bingen  (New York: Bell Tower, 1993), p.2. 

Number 28

Forests, winds, mountains, trees
are given to us that we may
understand
the human soul
deep-down

             --- Marina Tsvetayeva (translated by M.W D.)

Number 27

In life, one would like to be tenacious as a tree.

Number 26

Gary often tells me he thinks American poet Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) is great writer--though he admits he's been trying to read Patchen'sThe Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941) for a decade and still hasn't finished it.

Yesterday he handed me a book of Patchen's Selected Poems published by New Directions in 1946.  He said he thought I might enjoy it.  I did, and I found this in it (from a poem called "For Whose Adornment"):

For whose adornment the mouths
Of roses open in languorous speech;
And from whose grace the trees of heaven
Learn their white standing

Number 25

There is a certain lethargy in a mature tree--quite a dreamy lethargy--that allows an old tree to sustain itself.

Number 24

Gary's passion for books, always immense, has lately become something even more than that.  He lives with his books as if they were intimate and inseparable companions. 

Every evening, under the quiet light of his bedside-lamp, I find a book reposing on his pillow as if it were a fallen bird, vulnerable and wanting protection.

I pause and look at it, amused.  And with a suspended heart.  For me, it's as if the book were the branch of a tree.

Number 23

Generally speaking, what is a forest?  Both a monument and a society. (As a tree is both a being and a statue.)
                  ---Francis Ponge, Mute Objects of Expression (New York: Archipelago Books, 2008), p.111.

Number 22

Yesterday I saw trees by the river's edge,
Wrecked and broken beyond belief,
Only two or three trunks left standing,
Scarred by blades of a thousand axes.
Frost strips the yellowing leaves,
River waves pluck at the withered roots.
This is a way the living must fare.
Why curse at Heaven and Earth?

Han-shan, Cold Mountain, translated by Burton Watson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p.53.

Number 21

What I love in a tree is its upward desire.

Number 20

Here is a tree older than the forest itself;
The years of its life defy reckoning.
Its roots have seen the upheavals of hill and valley,
Leaves have known the changes of wind and frost.
The world laughs at its shoddy exterior
And cares nothing for the fine grain of the wood inside.
Stripped free of flesh and hide
All that remains is the core of truth.

Han-Shan, Cold Mountain, translated by Burton Watson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 67.
….

From the Notebooks, 2010-2020.
Number 31: The Little Storm Outside the Window (April 10, 2014).

Number 19

If I were thinking of the trees as musical instruments, I would see the willow as a harp.

Number 18

Sometimes with an old tree, it seems enough only to breathe in its presence.

Number 17

Francis Ponge in his book Mute Objects of Expression, a collection of musing on a natural world and poetry from 1976, writes in a chapter called "The Pine Woods Notebook":  "Each pine wood is like a natural sanatorium, also a music hall...a chamber, a vast cathedral for meditation (fortunately a cathedral without a pulpit) open to all winds, but through so many doors it's as though they were closed.  For winds hesitate before them." 
This inscription, for me, adds to the spirit of all coniferous forests.

Number 16

Early each day the birds start singing from the top of the trees.  With the breaking of the light, their voices descend through the moist air, bearing the music of their miniature hearts.  When they sing, they radiate light.  It's as if they bring on the dawn.

Number 15

Gary tells me that after a long period of reading Andre Gide, he has now moved into what he likes to think of as a sort of "apprenticeship" (his word) to Andre Malraux. He recently showed me a passage in Malraux's Picasso's Mask (1976), where, in discussing "balance" in one of Picasso's sculptures, Malraux casually tosses into his discussion this quite brilliant phrase: "the trunk that brings order to the madness of branches." I wanted to use it here.

Number 14

Here is an arboreal model for wholeness, from Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez: "Roots and wings--but let the wings take root and the roots fly." 

Number 13

Perhaps because Gary and I have been re-watching many of Jean Cocteau's films with an intensity like never before, I had a perfect dream of standing in front of a majestic tree, that somehow transformed itself into a pipe organ and played all of Bach's The Art of The Fugue. 

Number 12

In a preface to his book This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years,  American poet Robert Bly, recounted how "One day sitting depressed in a cabin on the shore of a small lake, I wrote about the depression:

Mist: no one on the other shore.
It may be that these trees
I see have consciousness,
and this desire to weep comes from them.

Number 11

"If these trees were suddenly to start walking, they would destroy everything in their path.  But they choose to remain where they are...and instead of rage or fear, a silent tenacity possesses them.  Animals flee or attack; trees stay firmly planted where they are.  Patience: the heroism of plants."
                ----Octavio Paz, The Monkey Grammarian (New York: Seaver Books, 1981), pp. 5-6.

Number 10

The bark of this maple tree, enlivened by mist and moss, is like an intricately woven tapestry--with incurved flowers of wood.

Number 8

There is a mysterious lake in Prince Edward County, called Lake On The Mountain, with the most majestic, old willow trees, like giant goddesses, surrounding and guarding the water.  Their porous, silvery bark invites the touch and gathers moisture from the lake. 
In his book Water And Dreams, Gaston Bachelard suggests  "that life is simply an aroma, that it emanates from a being as an odor emanates from the substance, that a plant growing in a stream must express the soul of water...." 

Number 7

Jersey Lyric

view of winter trees
before
one tree

in the foreground
where
by fresh-fallen

snow
lie 6 woodchunks ready
for the fire

William Carlos Williams, "Jersey Lyric" from Pictures from Brueghel (New York: New Directions, 1962, p.33

Number 6

Gary is reading Andre Gide--he's been reading him all week.  He says there's a phrase in Gide's If It Die that he thought I might like.  And I do.  Gide is walking in a narrow valley near his home and remembers his friend, poet Francis Jammes, saying "And  skies too little over trees too big."

Number 5

Not long ago I began a notebook-- an alphabet--based on fragmentary photographs of trees.  Trees without their foliage can appear to look purely calligraphic.  
This maple tree seems to assumes the shape of the letter Y, and like in the letter Y, there is a mysterious point at which, the tree trunk, like a path or a road, splits itself into two directions.  Thinking of calligraphic marks that can be discerned subliminally as paths or roads, I remembered something from St. John of the Cross : " If a man wants to be sure of his road, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark." 

Number 4

I love this magnificent old cedar but I can't write about it.  It's too strong for me.  Gary suggested this: "The great cedar is striding; one day it will catch up to itself and fall."  I hope not.  We've lost too many trees in our neighbourhood this year

Number 3

Like an animal, this tree, still and peaceful, warms its limbs in the afternoon sun.