Essay on Trees

Last night, the big chestnut across the street was split in half, either by light
-ning or wind, I can’t tell which. I’m only mortal. I slept
as the elements took their toll, and awakened to a neighbor
-hood freighted by debris, branches and leaves, ochre and scarlet
and hunter green, like a bag of jewels dumped over the mountainside.
The tree was bisected almost perfectly, as if by blade. It refused
to fall. Seeing it, I did not think of my own impermanence, though I do
now, recalling its obliviated majesty.

*

One of my favorite bands on planet Earth is called the War
on Drugs, and they are playing live on my computer screen
for the nineteen minutes I give myself to jot down this sense
of things, in part so as not to lose it. I hold my son up with one arm.
Talk to him about tone, inheritance. I want to add a footnote about
how the guitar in Adam Granduciel’s hands comes from an elaborate
forest somewhere remote, where it is so dark the deer dart across
the understory without conflict, imperceptible as atoms.

*

The boy needs strawberries, so we are off to Trader Joe’s to forage
through boxes of discounted fruit, some just coming into the glory
of their season. Quietly, I await the apricots’ summer return. Across the parking
lot there is a sporting goods store. I have plans to buy a red rowing boat
built for two. The schematics of another are already sketched in my mind;
a bright orange copy of Boatbuilding tucked away in the bookcase to keep me
honest. There is a love I walk inside as old as the invisible generations of oaks
and evergreens keeping us alive. They are my witnesses and brothers.
In the cathedral of their shadows, my dreams grow tall.