How little a tree says.
What is a canopy but an offer of
shelter? A branch but a
search for light? What is a trunk
but a commitment?
Or bark but an awareness
that life eventually burns? That neighbors
are prone to attack, to latch on,
to harvest the finest inner
essence they can reach
by pincer, by fungus,
by ax. Trees have learned
these things over time.
How to offer up the dead parts
of their bodies first
so the world we call the world
will ignore that most of what
matters happens out of sight
a few feet beneath
our boots, where they pass
the cup and needn’t call
it generosity, or spread
news of a coming drought,
draw water to a dying friend
because maybe
there’s no single
word for tree, or perhaps
that’s all there has been—
alarm—for some time.
The tree listeners say so,
those magical few who
decode the electrical
pulses that travel deep
in the root structures
that fan out like galaxies
ganglia mixing with fungi
a crowded bazaar
of trade, friendship,
even love that stretches
for miles tells stories an epic
of love and despair.
What the scientists
hear, they mostly
say, is panic and distress,
though trees
might be saying other things
they don’t know how
to hear yet from the
hormones that course
through their giant
collective body,
as if any of us do not
feel a similar planing down
to what is sayable when
so much is
ringing in our limbs,
rising up in the low frequencies,
the rush
of familiarity
a copse
in the woods
huddling together in the wind,
a spell
asking for confirmation
as if what needs to be said
needs to be said.