trees: memories, elegies
forests are not a collection of trees, rather
a slowly morphing community of beings, a network of processes.
nothing has an independent existence. even us.
a kid climbing chinese elms in the south valley, albuquerque.
the young animal in me just wants to know.
clinging to the fissured bark, the fear and love of being held aloft.
our family sold xmas trees on the front lawn, taken from the family ranch.
i was good at finding them, liked the feel of the saw. sure, clean. in dominion.
fifty innocent firs packed in the bed of the jeep. two weeks of sparkle, then the dump.
i watched my cowboy uncle back his truck over a young spruce.
like it wasn’t there. wrong. in the heart.
what is this thing we call a tree? does it matter?
maybe twelve, splitting big ponderosa rounds for firewood.
i loved the violence, the thwunk of the axe, the clean uncoupling.
the exposure of the hidden, the never before seen.
that first winter in velarde, the only firewood the bare twisted cottonwood.
knotted stubborn fibers. the only saw a dull swedish bow saw.
the only axe used as a wedge. went through three handles, learned stubborn.
we are what we do. what we touch. what touches us.
what we remember.
we built the house on summit ridge with milled logs.
long spikes, sledge hammers, fitting tongues to grooves, former tree to former tree.
to sleep in that nest. the first driving rain: a slobbering waterfall on the inside.
caught in late fall windstorm in colorado. the crack and crash of flying limbs.
i see twenty tall aspens fall. the thwump as each one explodes into the ground.
to be killed by a tree. at first i am afraid.
pinon, juniper, scrub oak, ponderosa pine, aspen. i moved through them.
my bones were their bones. there was no need for prayer.
bodhi. dangsan namu. abraham’s oak. shinboku. bao bao. yggdrasil.
years later i learned to feel the energy of a tree from twenty feet away.
to feel the flow beneath the bark.
to feel the roots with my feet. learned. opened.
the aging animal in me just wants to know.
what is this thing we call a tree? what is this thing we call the earth?
what is this thing we call a mind?
on the west slope of the cascades the big cedars are dying.
suffocated by the heat. i had seven taken down yesterday.
landscaping, years of firewood. less oxygen, more smoke.
it could all come to this —
there is my name and there is the name of the tree.
and then there are no words at all.
Luther Allen writes poems from his mostly unmanaged 10 acres of mountainside near Bellingham, Washington. Read more.