White Cedar

It rises in a Champaign County bog

Amid bedstraw and skunk cabbage,

Rises out there in an ice age

River valley gorged with glacial till,

And swills the moraine-filtered rainwater

With the wafer ash and honeysuckle.

Stalwart, set apart, and biblical — 

As if one of that ancient company

That gave its coniferous canonical body

To the tent that shuttled God

Through the wilderness.

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They say that cedar and cypress

Are the protectors of  bones.

You see them from the freeway, standing alone,

Statuesque and serious,

In the dead middle of and vigilant

In beanfields, where farmers used to plant

Their families.

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Who are you like in your greatness?

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I wonder what bones it watches over,

What chalk-dry remains its roots

Break alkali to act as epitaph for.

The mastodon that grazed this sedge?

Sloth? All the Methuselahs

Unearthed if the fen were dredged?

Behemoth and Leviathan?

I’ve always dreamt I came from old dirt,

Antediluvian, ground titans moved on,

Died on. What colossal flanks

And shoulders chafed its trunk — 

This ancient boreal sentinel that sinks

To taste this modest Ohio plot,

As if lisping a high tongue to accommodate

My low limestone argot?

I won’t leave this place today,

Not without a draft of the old beast breath

Engrafted in each down-soft spray.

•

Each bottomless chip of  bark.

The secret is: even before the ax flies

You have an ark.