Convince me you have a seed there.
Off Plot Road in March thaw, I stop in a stand of red pines
to listen to tilt as each trunk follows wind in its crown
and sounds grain against grain, straining noise as intimate
as that of a joint aching into age.
I can see outside the pines the weave
of things, crows in a lone oak concatenating, the ecotone
where meadow meets forest, white folks,
clear cut not long ago to farm hay on open land later
reclaimed by the succession of trees,
mostly the mechanism of small animals
and hard weather on Clay Hill above the valley village I left
on foot to find, up Cemetery Road, the old graves buried
in terraced drifts, headstones and rows visible over snow,
totally grayscale except for sumac at cemetery's
edge, upright red cones torching holes, and the visual field
the way the fresh kill I found en route
melted the snow its startled predator had dropped it in,
blood and feathers a deep wet nest.
The day looked less dense without leaves,
but winter felt thicker with the effort of getting there,
and I went on past graves holding settlers
and Civil War vets until the pines seemed to charm me out
of myself to stop and stand and think,
touching their live hard sides.
Of Plato's vision, the human, not an earthly,
but a heavenly plant, the soul housed in the head
threaded down out of abstract heaven
to live in the physical soil, the human rooted in the two
worlds.
I look up to see each trunk unsettled by wind.
Torque makes groan and crowns twist
against roots in earth the way I might fight an idea that
seizes me with its weather, and I
wonder what it sounds like, the loblolly bioengineered
by ArborGen, its genes spliced with Monterey pine, mouse ear
cress, sweet gum, and even E coli
to become disease-resistant, a super tree trademark.
What makes a tree, their website asks, valuable?
And answers: superior growth, maximum value.
Approved by the Feds, its dense, straight, grained wood
climbs to 46 feet over nine growing seasons, each tree
a version of Plato's vision, an earthly plant
imbued with eidos enough to better bring it
to market, the heavenly power that keeps the tree reaching
toward it.
A cold winter's warm day filled the walk uphill with thaw,
falling loud from eaves and limbs
and rills thrilled the angled road.
My socks are wet.
And I started thinking, and I stand
thinking of Thoreau, who wrote, convince me
you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
And I think of transgenic pollen germinating
after it travels hundreds of miles
and how farmers can't contain cross-pollination
between spliced and wild species,
and how hybrid trees will intertwine
with the hungers of the red squirrel, paws
sideways, bright against dark bark, an acorn
between its orange teeth.
And I do not move further toward the laboratory
future sewn in genes chosen and fused
to produce fruit and fall to seed a kind of life
not yet legible to us.
I want to believe wind will make new wood grain grown
and yellow curtains of pollen will below after mud season
finishes off a long winter.
I want to believe birds will drop coniferous seeds
and fields cleared of old red oak
and rodents will store hoards of acorns that will root and rise
after fires clear out dry pines, and all
will continue the succession of trees
in a world in which we'll touch others invented for a profit
made ontological, the very genome grafted to capital.
I stand inside the charm the stand makes out of wind,
the stand someone planted and didn't harm or harvest,
and so has persisted beyond human use
for so long the base of each trunk
is ringed thick with moss, watered by runoff
washing nutrients down yards of bark.
Years of touch create this color collaring the pines
with a green and brighter than their needles.
Material relation, the ensoiled soul
we are rooted in, the way heaven derives itself
from words for sky and words for stone,
the way a birch has infiltrated the symmetrical
stand at an angle, weighted by snow, its rough trunk
bent and its bark sloughing off botched swaths around lichen
in wide ruptures, working upward,
a teaspoon of saffron stain, the startle of fox piss in snow.