Alison Hawthorne Deming
Kinship with Trees and Crows
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
I was surprised during pandemic lockdown to realize how much trees meant to me, how much they signified the place I was no longer free to visit. The place lived in my imagination through people I missed and the homeplace I’ve known since childhood – the rituals of domesticity. Facebook and Zoom kept me updated on people. But I kept dwelling on three trees that I’d come to know well over many decades of their companionship during summers spent in the Canadian Maritimes. I’d seen their slow changes, living as they do in a time scale utterly inscrutable to mine. Their heroic determination to withstand damage and stress. This gave me comfort, urged me to temper impatience and fear with reflection. And thinking this way I felt a communion between plant and mind that became the spur to this poem—each line isolated from the others yet all united by thought and form and love.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
5/31/2021
Photo Credit: Bear Guerra
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, a recent Guggenheim Fellow, is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona. Her new nonfiction book A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress will be out from Counterpoint in August 2021. Her most recent poetry book is Stairway to Heaven (Penguin 2016).