WEBVTT

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Convince me you
have a seed there.

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Off Plot Road in March thaw,
I stop in a stand of red pines

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to listen to tilt as each
trunk follows wind in its crown

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and sounds grain against grain,
straining noise as intimate

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as that of a joint
aching into age.

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I can see outside
the pines the weave

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of things, crows in a lone
oak concatenating, the ecotone

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where meadow meets
forest, white folks,

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clear cut not long ago to
farm hay on open land later

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reclaimed by the
succession of trees,

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mostly the mechanism
of small animals

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and hard weather on Clay Hill
above the valley village I left

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on foot to find, up Cemetery
Road, the old graves buried

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in terraced drifts, headstones
and rows visible over snow,

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totally grayscale except
for sumac at cemetery's

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edge, upright red cones torching
holes, and the visual field

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the way the fresh
kill I found en route

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melted the snow its startled
predator had dropped it in,

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blood and feathers
a deep wet nest.

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The day looked less
dense without leaves,

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but winter felt thicker with
the effort of getting there,

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and I went on past
graves holding settlers

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and Civil War vets until the
pines seemed to charm me out

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of myself to stop
and stand and think,

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touching their live hard sides.

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Of Plato's vision, the
human, not an earthly,

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but a heavenly plant, the
soul housed in the head

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threaded down out
of abstract heaven

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to live in the physical soil,
the human rooted in the two

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worlds.

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I look up to see each
trunk unsettled by wind.

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Torque makes groan
and crowns twist

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against roots in earth the
way I might fight an idea that

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seizes me with
its weather, and I

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wonder what it sounds like,
the loblolly bioengineered

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by ArborGen, its genes spliced
with Monterey pine, mouse ear

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cress, sweet gum,
and even E coli

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to become disease-resistant,
a super tree trademark.

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What makes a tree, their
website asks, valuable?

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And answers: superior
growth, maximum value.

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Approved by the Feds, its
dense, straight, grained wood

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climbs to 46 feet over nine
growing seasons, each tree

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a version of Plato's
vision, an earthly plant

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imbued with eidos enough
to better bring it

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to market, the heavenly power
that keeps the tree reaching

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toward it.

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A cold winter's warm day filled
the walk uphill with thaw,

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falling loud from
eaves and limbs

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and rills thrilled
the angled road.

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My socks are wet.

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And I started
thinking, and I stand

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thinking of Thoreau,
who wrote, convince me

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you have a seed there, and I
am prepared to expect wonders.

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And I think of transgenic
pollen germinating

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after it travels
hundreds of miles

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and how farmers can't
contain cross-pollination

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between spliced
and wild species,

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and how hybrid trees
will intertwine

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with the hungers of
the red squirrel, paws

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sideways, bright against
dark bark, an acorn

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between its orange teeth.

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And I do not move further
toward the laboratory

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future sewn in genes
chosen and fused

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to produce fruit and fall
to seed a kind of life

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not yet legible to us.

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I want to believe wind will
make new wood grain grown

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and yellow curtains of pollen
will below after mud season

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finishes off a long winter.

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I want to believe birds
will drop coniferous seeds

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and fields cleared
of old red oak

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and rodents will store hoards of
acorns that will root and rise

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after fires clear out
dry pines, and all

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will continue the
succession of trees

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in a world in which we'll touch
others invented for a profit

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made ontological, the very
genome grafted to capital.

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I stand inside the charm
the stand makes out of wind,

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the stand someone planted
and didn't harm or harvest,

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and so has persisted
beyond human use

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for so long the
base of each trunk

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is ringed thick with
moss, watered by runoff

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washing nutrients
down yards of bark.

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Years of touch create this
color collaring the pines

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with a green and brighter
than their needles.

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Material relation,
the ensoiled soul

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we are rooted in, the
way heaven derives itself

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from words for sky
and words for stone,

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the way a birch has
infiltrated the symmetrical

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stand at an angle, weighted
by snow, its rough trunk

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bent and its bark sloughing off
botched swaths around lichen

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in wide ruptures,
working upward,

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a teaspoon of saffron stain,
the startle of fox piss in snow.

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