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.