Ghost Trees —
Many times I passed the white oak stump
going down the
steep slope west of Ganier Ridge —
before I looked
inside it;
it’s two feet taller
than I am and all my attention was on
the hollow eye-level dark — I would lean
away some because something
in its gloom looked like
spider webs catching all
the light in there and
I didn’t notice its
trunk lying up the hillside not
five feet away as I speed
coasted on down the trail
and circled back to the
east parking lot or
let the lake trail call me
like the day the lady with
the tripod and large telescope asked me
are you a birder too? No
I’m tree people I said.
Do you like winter trees
she asked.
I love even dead trees I
said and then
I said to this stranger
something I’d only half thought
to myself, that trees are
different
in death than we are; the
spirit
stays with the body of
trees, makes them
grow beautiful in death as
our bodies, the spirit
gone, grow putrid.
Certainly
their
forms
are lively, she said
reaching to adjust her
tripod in a way
that allowed her to take
two steps back from me.
Even when they become
paneling or something
their ghost stays with the
substance
breaks into pieces like
chewing tobacco to go with the parts
and, out in woods, a fallen
log, the spirit stays there
bartering grace for place
to track time
in keys subtler and
stronger as decay
goes deeper, a slow
transformation into invisibility
becoming firewood merely
speeds.
I finally notice she’s
afraid
she’s in the presence of a
crazy man,
smile at her and walk
on. I made
the mistake that UPS man
made the day,
in the parking lot, he said
to me, I have to come here
to preserve my sanity, and
I felt
he was profoundly
embarrassed to have said it
as we walked away from each
other, that I hadn’t said,
whatever polite agreement I
made to him, the thing to revive
his fragile truth which
could not survive the transport
of being uttered, a deep
red wine
traveling badly as gasoline
in an open bucket
in the back of a pickup
someone should’ve
poured into the gas tank.
So I make
for him too this poetry
talk
tell such things
and get by with it.
Soon I had to look in that dark stump
coming down
the steep west slope.
At first I saw
I thought something animal
a small owl
I thought half a second then
I thought a large moth was
luminous
inside as I speed coasted on down the trail
grey tracings
of its animal dark fading
in my mind
But taking
the trail the other way
around — up the steep side — I pass that stump
without seeing it. Once
when I noticed I’d passed it
I went back to find it
my mind fretting over the stark prose confession
that I can’t
afford to come to these woods
and write poetry
because it reduces
the intensity of my lunge
toward money thus in
masochism
churning
my mind
contemplates
sacrifice of
the true poet led
down the hill singing
burn me lord burn me I’m still full of shit
false poet his
faithful companion says
you
shouldn’t talk to God like that
as if everything we said were not said to
god As if we did not think
in god As if we could like Caliban in Robert Browning
hide our heads
beneath an overhanging bank
and in root and leaf entwined secrecy
look at undersides of love
and freedom and death
as if they were magnetic
chess pieces.
Forgot I was going
back to the stump, passed
it again, turn back
up the hill.
I tease with the muse, say “you know
the old blue grass song
‘This is the last song I’m ever gonna sing’
with the “trick” ending: ‘on this stage tonight’?”
“How else,” she answers, “to lay poetry down
than in a poem; go ask Harleman where else
you could find a shelf for it.”
My negotiations with the muse are spread around the
Ganier Ridge trail
under the Chestnut Oaks like little black Sambo’s
tiger butter.
She compels me
or
the stump hollow has charmed me
to detect
its story, to read in
dark wrapped space
the
lightning:
it was
scorched
made the inside black so the more
light
there
the more that color fed so grew
not light but luminous
and an inner column stood
past the lightning strike till gravity brought it down
2, 3, 4 seconds
later
protecting a narrow
jagged ridge of
wood from wearing
the charred lining, the greyed natural
wood color so bright by contrast
I had thought it spider web.
I turn
across the trail for the
first time to look
at the trunk there, see how
its broken bottom
and the long wound of the
stump
fit as 3 dimensional puzzle
pieces
look back and forth between them.
Rilke said
we are the bees
of the invisible. I think of that as I see
overhead the empty sky where the tree drank light
before the crash
but
it’s too intellectual; he said that in prose,
in a letter, as an excuse to reason, a reduction
of poetry’s speed to thought’s stillness. I like
better
thinking of
the plains Indians ghost
dance religion.
I see
the tree in its green days dancing in faith I will
come, someone
come, and know it resurrected, the knowing
like a stylus to a record, little thing
it slips thru
into loud vision
where it is
still
shaking.
(continued)
