We are pruning the oaks this week--I have trees on the brain so here are two poems about trees--one short, one long.

         The Right Season for Pruning

Is this really the right season for pruning--
          with such a zealous blue sky
                    poking through the piles of severed limbs--
With jolly yellows raining down
          to the music of chainsaws--
With dizzy, fizzy glory in the air
And in the high limbs
          the hatchets and mariachi music
                    and the whistling of the butchers?



                  Hymn of Trees

A lonely child befriends trees.
An uprooted, solitary child will gravitate
          to bunched and anchored things--
The eucalyptus' smooth dancer arms
          or the poplar with its sentry's posture
                   or the cypress' arabesque
                              cradling the evening star.

And such a child will spend much time
          wondering what these ancients know
                    watching a tickling line of ants navigate a trunk
          or tracing a woodpecker's neat and dotty path.

Such a child will surely sense
          in leafy generosity and stolid patience,
An aged and profound mystery
          grown into those rings
                    of bounty and depravation--
                              the story at a tree's heart.
And if that wondering child will slow enough,
          will still to a tree's stillness,
Until the truth of still things
                    collects at the fingertips
          and seeps up from bare earth through bare toes--
What is absorbed might connect this child,
          might make a lie of the walking world's notion
                    of self, of distinctness.

Then a quiet child,
                    a listening kind of child,
Will hear the hymn of trees--
Will hear them singing in their woody wordless way--
          their song like breathing,
                    like the whoosh of blood in the ears,
                              or a thrum in a wire.

It is a hymn of being, of wholeness.
A canticle of belonging.
That each is something more than self.
That the isolation of the walking,
          their private littleness,
                    the hungry ghost of self they suffer
                              is a kind of virus.
That each rage is then a self inflicted wound
          each selfishness a kind of betrayal.
That this lie of the individual--
          this plague of personhood--
                    is the veil.
The shroud.

And if this listening child will hush the noise,
          the clatter and the clutter,
                    and tune the ear to the very music in trees--
          those conduits like harp strings
                    shivering song from earth to sky and back--
Then this child might know what trees know--
That any life flares and fades
          and what trees sing--
That our personal little firework
          is just blip on bark,
                    the tickle of ant feet,
                              the poke of beak.
That it is the hymn that matters.
That it is the hymn itself that sustains the world.
The hymn is what is.