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
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.
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.
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.
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..
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
"Sap check'd with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness everywhere...."
Shakespeare, Sonnets, V
I've been reading some Emerson and Thoreau lately, specifically Thoreau's essay, "Walking" and Emerson's famous "Nature," both bound together in a handsome paperback edition (Beacon Press, 1991) with charming wood engravings by Thomas W. Nason.
In "Nature," Emerson writes "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right."
Detail from a 2015 water colour by Malgorzata Wolak Dault
In his Specimen Days (1882), poet Walt Whitman announces, in "The Lesson of a Tree," that he is about to talk about "his favourite poplar." What he proceeds to say could apply, however, to any tree anywhere:
"How strong, vital, enduring! how doubly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing.”
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.
Unlike the young tree, which longs to grow beyond
itself, an old tree resigns itself to being what it now is.
"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
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...."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
