giving my apple core a toss
watching it arc
and land in a forest clearing
i think of you Dad
saying where should i plant
an apple tree today
a habit from boyhood summers
at your uncle’s orchard
continuing into your college days
on a motor scooter
with Mom exploring every mountain
and forest in Pennsylvania
the fall and only the fall
was for apples
culminating in your favorite
the stayman winesap
give me shade tolerance
so i can worship the sun
at a cellular level
teach me the dance
in abundance
the sects of insects
how to work like
an artist’s model
with wind or fire
how to mine in place
and turn the soil
into an accomplice
how to communicate
with an alien life form
in speech acts of pure energy
how to grow wound wood
i pass a black glove stuck
to a white oak beside the trail
and soon i am seeing trees with faces
pot-bellied old maples
great buttressed oaks
limbs spreading in all directions
spared for the shade
they once gave livestock
now filling in fast
with pole timber
and a blue-green haze
of little white pines coming up
an old pasture slowly climbing
toward the bovine clouds
these days i wear wonder
like a broad-brimmed hat
when the moon is dead empty
i try to lose my shadow
i cut what i thought were tethers
they turn out to be roots
when i stop writing on paper
the trees become less hostile
i could swallow what’s left of my fire
and tend bees
i would write myself out of history
line by painstaking line
Standing outside my front door on this rainy night is the closest thing to a son or daughter I’ll ever have: an eastern red cedar tree, which I found and transplanted when it was one or two years old back in 1993, and has since grown into a bit of a monster, towering over the house. The old place in Maine where we lived till I was five had a number of juniper bushes in the former pasture, where I used to play a lot, and I think that’s what appealed to me about having a closely related species right by the door. And sure, I knew it would turn into a tree rather than a bush, but I still thought it would stay on the small side. It hasn’t — much to the delight of roosting songbirds. I have to prune branches that rub against the roof, but still, on stormy nights, I hear it thump, thump, thumping against the house.
spring thaw
trees retrieving their reflections
from the ice
A tree seems like the very embodiment of presence, but this time of year it is mostly absent, at least aboveground. It’s real in the same way that a life-size cardboard cutout of a politician is real. You can project anything onto it. It’s another blank space on your mental map.
sleeping it off
on a park bench
fallen leaves
Seeing the almost bare trees as antennae—intelligence-gathering stations for an alien umwelt, the rococo feelers of moths.
lonesome hollow
speaking softly so the void
doesn’t reply
What I miss most of all in the colder months: beetles and butterflies, crickets at night, and those delicate ninjas the ichneumon wasps. The way they tap the ground with paired canes, sniffing, listening.
unmarked path
a stick leaning on a tree
for the next hiker
the hobo is missing
one of his fingers
sprung fully formed
like a god from the lung
will you rot back
into a travesty of spring
what birds would roost
in the untuning forks of your limbs
and what would they sing
like a real tree do you yearn
to be free of oxygen
bronchial to a fault
would you burn
in this foreign land
Norway maple leaves turn
ugly
upside-down somehow
in my phone’s photo
false Solomon’s-seal
backwater
stream-blurred trees come into
sharper focus
Keep Your Dog on a Leash
the notice board co-signed
by porcupine teeth
tall hemlock
nearly dead from adelgids
unfeathered
every year more rain
railroad noise burrows
into the ferns
that ice avalanche
my brother’s mark on a tree
lost to moss
two faces
on the side of a beech
one has no mouth