After Watching the Zoom Presentation, “The Trees of Marys Peak”
Alison Townsend
(Marys Peak, 4097 feet, the highest point in Oregon’s Coast Range)
It’s like being back in my college
dendrology class, slides of trees—Douglas fir,
Noble fir, western hemlock, and cedar—flashing past
in Powerpoint, as I scribble notes about these needled
green saints, thinking how the language of science—
bract, stomata, resin blister—fails to capture
their spirit or the sound of wind combed through
their branches—music I listened to stored
in my body the way sunlight is stored in theirs.
How many mornings did I stand in our back yard
and study the mountain, cloaked in green, plunging
through the sky like a humpback whale, a surf
of torn chiffon clouds drifting behind, its presence
anchoring me to earth? I remember climbing
the mountain with my friend Katherine.
She’d slipped a lapis lazuli egg into my hand
the day I admitted myself to the psych ward,
whispering fiercely, Live, though I never had any
intention of dying. And here was the mountain
with my mother’s name, visible every day
as I walked or ran, gardened or wept—its fir-
clad shape a frigate cutting the blue sea of air,
the beauty of it poetry I will never be able to write,
though I copy down information I already know
through my senses about each tree, thinking
I might need it someday, any day, soon.
Later, I lift the lid on a small cedar basket
of fir cones I’ve had on my desk for thirty years—
bracts and seeds and loose needles all mixed up—
and sniff, as if I could bring the clean, piney scent
of each tree back—loss an opening, after all,
a way to a voice, a place, a story called home,
there beneath that mountain where the Kalapuya
may or may not have gone to have visions,
and which might or might not have been named
for an indigenous maiden or the first white woman
across the Willamette, the mountain where,
on a clear day, the Pacific unrolls its endless blue
map to the west and the Cascades’ cones breast
the sky to the east, mountain that saved me
simply by being itself, its trees alive inside my body,
their spiky green a language I can almost speak.
Alison Townsend’s newest book is the memoir, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home (2022). She has also authored two books of poetry, The Blue Dress and Persephone in America and a short prose collection, The Persistence of Rivers. Read more.