Tree Elegy Across the Biosphere in Memory of…

Pollination against the seed to grow canopy

and mark place in shades of green—dry here to reflect

in glassine quartz chips in the off-red dirt where trees tree

as the forest is difference there green-inflected light you nurtured far

where volcanic would give name in poem or misty rain for each better-

suited frond of palm, its trunk, those particular roots. Here, so dry.

Not to have visited outside the lines you published,

strands of rain where trade winds dry as here easterlies

sap the energy of watering. It’s where we read, as you knew,

where the single tree in a back garden opens out to all

trees momentarily safe, or at least alive, before the chop.

I knew a man who tried to make a suburban backyard into a palm house.

Arecaceae would seem like part of the joke as we measure

tank rungs and how many waterings left, aside from our drinking.

But you see them where farmhouses were built and lost or condemned

for varying reasons—twin date palms (“fate palms”) thick and robust

and the scrabble of rubble and chimney between. But no habitat of like, just addendum.

Living in a shack there was a single great chestnut, not a walnut, out of place.

A chestnut introduced like a vision of walks, the tessellations

of light collected into prayer, which is where it began for you. And for others.

The mirror of any leaf, the flipside, the reverse, is the growing and falling

enigma—even here among the non-deciduous, dry leaves fall, stroke light.

Whole branches cut off from the supply when sap is difficult to supplement, create.

That vegetation cleared for plantation leaps shadows out of wasted soil, to scaffold.

Gardening. I have known so many gardeners who sought

to build hope out of the clearing, to remake an image of plenty,

of sharing fresh air and taking stale breath. Each quietly “oracular,” if in denial,

each afraid of drought though remembering greened light in their plans,

their reticulation, their watching the weather. To make a calm to spread—

there if we bother to look, to listen to the birds moving in and out, some staying.

You knew back gardens, and you knew the streets made bare, as they

are here—say, of Melbourne, green-gilled city, whose old planted trees become expendable?

Or where I am, huge chunks of bush grubbed out daily with excuses made

or not bothered with—hard to keep track of outside the shade of verandas, offices.

Or among the palms on another island, Réunion, the warning of offensive odor

though a beauty that might make an activist or remaker of demi-lost verse forms.

What is there in common, across the list of names, of species—growing

conditions, from a part of the world far from where they’re coaxed into a differing

light? What is there in common if we’re not in the place of writing,

and yet we are grown into, welded rhizome by rhizome? You cannot take

the first bird I see today—a yellow-rumped thornbill tuning in, foraging

for the rest of the small flock—any more than I would choose to. It tends the image.

Each cell an art to tempt and let be to rebuild the soil. But no profiling,

and no conflict. The straggly tenuous but tough contradictions of York gums’

outer reaches supple but brittle closer to a perception of where a heart might rest,

termites holding the strings of a pacemaker, split and opening out to tempt owlet nightjars—

I heard one calling from a broken limb at 10:49 the other night and you were still breathing,

sleeping your breath to the canopy of world? That near and far line of prayer.

Once, on a very small island, a coral island big enough for a dozen palms

and a colony of land crabs and two humans, the heart of a young palm

was torn out and handed over to the one unfamiliar with its form or taste.

He ate, and the palm was gone. Coconuts were spouting, finding and making

on the atoll, at the outer. Lugging vats of water up and down the valley wall,

I think this, and your line, a late line: “nothing is missing”—a conclusion?

I wrote of that palmheart for a heart surgeon years ago because all elegies

are entwined, even those of different endocrines. The circulatory system of memorials.

If welcomed under the green light of plantings, the off-spectrum aspiration

against grief, I would have told you of the jam tree—acacia acuminata—

because we are surrounded by them against the odds, and they come back,

thriving on disturbed ground, with trouble around them. Short-lived treeshrubs,

their rough bark exchanges codes of camouflage with stick insects, as I look

now and can’t see beyond the idea of an insect being there, legs forward like antennae.

Rot here is powder rather than mulch, mostly. Saplings rise to spend time dying.

But some pull through and some will become part of the width of those great jarrahs

felled by ancestors, their essences pushing against climate to make good.

My “you” can’t be yours, but the moon and sun do their own syzygy for us all.

Language is vegetation. I knew a couple who screened their cedar kit home

from a country pub with a line then another line and another line of native trees.

I have a family who planted tens of thousands of trees to reclaim saltland settlement

hauled out of its deep sleeping, its subroots. I knew a person who filled empty

paddocks with trees deleted for a new suburb, next to the new suburb where

bushland had hung on against the trend, gone late. To have known morning in those places!

I know you’ll have known this—how thick vegetation, the uprights and bends

of trees on a still morning, can enhance our ability to pick out the between-notes

of birdwork. You wrote of clarity, and translated ornate forms, to be filled with a moment’s

singularity. Respiration. Our greatest breath might be so low or a rasp like a storm

coming in to rejuvenate, to depart with cataclysm. And so we pass with varying

degrees of light, the need for oxygen in the dismantling of carbohydrates.

Night is eating of oxygen. But more, much more out in bare day. So in our sleep

we join the trees, wrapped in leaves and fronds, held out of consciousness by tendrils.

So we thank god for photosynthesis more than we thank god for the sun as itself?

Here, we have valley, we have curved rim of valley closing out, here we have a kite, too—

a black-shouldered kite that hovers above the infrequent powerlines and self-supply,

and here we have year building on year that is an aside to a past that builds in all directions.

The inner green of room cracked in the thermal economics of presence

that underwrites reflection in crops and their residues, a shattering of light

in glassy stubble, the march against concrete and lead, against ordnance

and conquest, just roots holding soil so dry it is tempted to lift as a plume

across the district, hungering after the great dust devil that took off a roof

and opened a house down near Picnic Hill Road not long after you passed.

Interior of wood of fallen branch of loosened fibers and machines striking out

from gravel shoulders to lay great flooded gums on creek beds a trickle of old seasons

green with algae, green with signatures of flow, the bridges where great roots held sway.

What remakes such wasted soil? We try local species and intertwine with olive trees.

And in our suppressed thoughts, palmistry is a lush future of shade and flycatchers

maintaining the relationship between mosquitoes and moisture. No toxins; no anti-growth.

Our night-lights out here stick out sharp—sore thumb exposure, a failure of perspective

of what is lured to the hot light. Mouth dry. We go away too and bring places

back in descriptions but we won’t let them set root—they grow inside and reach

no light, this bright light that weakens accustoming eyes over time, straining

to pick out moss from lichen, which shields the granite boulders it breaks down.

Gradient cuts underfoot the echidna following termite galleries, interstices

of plumbed surface-sounds. We go back to the records, the old books, which are young

and would replace those earlier cuckoo sounds, the kickings-out in nests, the breaking

through of secret chambers—all here, too, like birth, but with an unanswered history,

or partially echoed and not fully addressed. This stuff we do with our souls to adjust

the fragments of bush to whose maps? To miss the kangaroo trail though it’s before our eyes,

or the path of an elusive rain, or a lake whose existence you might request, hint at, question?

Diverse as the air after war is gone but we still can’t breathe so something slips

or grafts. The stain. We rely on such conservancy, on gestures of repair and renewal

that regenerate, to sustain with hands-off learning to let be, to live alongside,

harvest no more than needs be. Such need manifests. Such sleep of passing

is the caveat, is the covenant is the testament of work that rains without a cloud in the sky.

Memorandum of walk of planting of tending: crowbar to break soil or soft cell, either way.

Mostly, people search for pathways to exemptions

so they can cut down protected trees. Mostly, people

search for ways to get around those thin laws so they

can bring down an old system of life. But here, too, we

want to keep the trees going against the trend of felling,

to give breath to those who stifle the art of growth.

Pollination with the grain to grow canopy

and mark place in shades of green—dry here to reflect

from fool’s gold but grow gnarled out of off-red dirt we coax with seedlings

if rain sets green-inflected light you nurtured far from here, far where necessities

work outside the poem for each better-suited frond of palm frond, a eucalypt trunk,

any particular roots. Dry wet dry. Making growth to suit a soil’s recovery.