Black Poplar: The Passion
Yes, passion, by which I mean patience
having outlived ten times over
the building they were meant to screen –
if you can call this living, almost unconcerned
if they stand or they fall: that grand impartiality
– and who’s to say if this is suffering,
to be wrenched by a cramp-pang of wind,
trunk buckling over, half its fibres frayed,
the others twisted to a hawser? Or to shed a limb
and grow on, each bough broadcasting
a gesture too wide, insupportable,
till they sag to their elbows, half reclining
like a Roman at the banquet, half the Dying Gaul,
fresh twigs bristling up regardless
at whatever the new vertical might be?
To split and sunder, buckling into the arms
of the thicket, or lie prone in mute
communion with the ground, as ivy ropes it down
like Gulliver in Lilliput, as moss and fungi swarm
its bark, its plate-tectonic rifts? To feel one’s innards
mouldering to moist dust? To be hollow at the heart-
wood core? (We say ‘heartwood’ as if it lived
as we do; no, the heartwood is the stopped
clock; only sapwood grows.) To be the bridge
between the living and the dying? You need only ask
the poplars. Do you truly want to know?
Philip Gross has published nearly 30 collections of poetry in 40 years, most recently The Shores of Vaikus (Bloodaxe, 2024). Read more.
“Black Poplar: The Passion” will appear in The Field, the Wood, the Way by Philip Gross (Bloodaxe, forthcoming).