I love drawing on childhood memories that brought a sustainable rhythm to my adult life. Perhaps it's the innocence, the wonder, and the curiosity, but I always find so much material from the magic of youth that is no longer - a belief in the outdoor world before succumbing to the human quest to name and have domain (Ursulla Leguin's "She Unnames Them," 1985) over ever aspect of it. So, here's a sestina born in response to a question.
Just a Wikipedia of Trees
My grandmother was good at talking with the trees,
because she would listen to their stories and sing them to the ants
that collected crumbs blowing about her summer porch from the winds
that trickled down the hill, over the lake. My childhood has roots
in her journals, her doodles, her drawings and her poems that branched
from page to page where she scribbled, painted, drew, and offered the universe hope.
Driving up the hill, towards our camp, my sisters and I always hoped
we’d see water-skiers, boats, and swimmers, and we’d sing, “I see the trees
and the trees see me,” like she did while waving a willow branch
to shoo away house flies and to rid laborious, work-a-holic ants.
If they got too close. Swwwphh. Gone. Ann. E. Rip. Hynka, with white roots
giving way to her burgundy-dyed, Merlot hair - any color to match a glass of wine,
to be raised to Mother Nature (Hynka she called her) and the wind.
God + Hynka (did the nasty, she said) and made Mother earth = Maude/Hope.
Artemis would approve. So would Bacchus. And Dionysus gave us our roots
(a love of bourbon and hiking comes naturally, as does contemplating the trees) -
shoot, when I first read Tolkien and discovered Bombadil & the Ents
I thought, “Crap. How did all of Grannie Annie’s ideologies branch
into the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien? Such family trees. The Ukraine branching
perogies & possibility across the United States. Ancestry. Another narrative winding
throughout a pastiche of potential democracy. Who are my uncles? My aunts?
Where did we come from? How deep do the rhizomes go? Hopefully
there are ways to untangle such Gordian knots residing underneath the soil of family trees.
Okay, so this Dane married that German, and these Scots created deep roots
with those English folk, and there there was the Irish (oh, how we love to drink: bourbon + root
beer + a squeeze of orange = nirvana). A few of those, phew, and I’m ready to branch
into poetry and the personal tapestry of reading landscapes & writing nature while talking to trees.
Thirteen years of blogging, 101 writers’ notebooks, my two shits to the wind,
and I'm still trying to compile a theory of language and words. Oh, how I Love to Believe in Hope…
Yes, Godzilla meets Bambi, I know. And we humans are nothing but career-oriented ants.
So, I became a runner. Love the oxygen, and on the pavement each day I try to avoid ants,
beetles, and mud-puddling butterflies who get nutrients from life’s roots,
stones, and leaves. All this is evidence of being alive on the paths. I pace myself, hoping,
narrating, and singing optimism to the clouds overhead while leaping over fallen branches.
They’re epic songs, actually, once sung by the warriors to the stars on windy nights,
but forgotten by storytellers who battled much less, who relied more on the shelter of trees.
Ah, humanity. Those ants have a better orchestration of it all - their logical plans branched
throughout intricate, underground routes. Their truth is whispered (so they tell me) in the wind
blowing against Pandora’s box. Human hope, I guess, is just a Wikipedia of trees.
No comments:
Post a Comment