Poem-A-Day #165 : Wood (Part 12 : Roots)

Trees want you dead. Trees are plotting. Read Part One HERE.


Wood (Part 12 : Roots)

I had a dream that I was pulling out the roots of a tree with my bare hands : they were worms snakes tentacles of difficult that curled around my arms and tightened until my skin turned purple and the veins burst : my blood poured from my arms like stigmata and I collapsed in the now red mud and rolled like a baby in tantrum : earth thought about swallowing me but felt nauseous with the heat of summer : it was pregnant was fighting a cold was full of other bodies : I was too much for it and the roots let my limbs go and I sailed into the night laying in this un-tomb :

Then I got up this morning and dug bricks with the names of the dead etched into them out of the hungry soil : the names stared at me oddly as if I could understand them if I just looked more but their histories vanish as the dirt is wiped off :

This is an AIDS garden it is forgotten and it is drying in the sun : I think about my arms open to the light and air and I think about being able to do this without dying : I imagine myself as a succulent in a window box stretching my one finger-like stalk towards the sun until the tip pinks and opens into anemone and feelers : I think about AIDS and how it transmits like ideas : a meme of unimaginable power : you learn its name and then it is inside of you and then your skin will harden and your eyes will pucker : we all have AIDS some inside of our bodies and some inside of our thoughts :

Pressing marigolds into the earth with my grandfather : the coolness of the dark soil between my fingers and under my nails : the faces of the plants have yet to open they are thinking about opening they are paused they are unborn :

Please hold this for a moment : it is the end of the root that tried to kill me : it has been pulled three meters out of the ground the skin is paper and falling off and underneath it is white and looks like raw potato : it is bone : we will keep pulling together until we find which tree it belongs to : which hand it is the pointer finger of : maybe we should taste it and see if it also is starchy and dense : I remember chewing on raw wood and feeling the sensation of it being green and dense and like what I imagine a finger would be in your mouth :

I want to eat the world : and this hole opening up that was in my dream and is now in this garden and now also involves you is becoming a mouth that could do that work for me : I drop bricks into the maw until it resembles the insides of a shark the face of a lamprey :

Hold this root against your skin until it inches itself under it and into it and to your blood stream and then to your heart like it is a clot finding the center : what do you suppose happens once it is there :

Poem-A-Day #162 : Wood (Part 9 : Alyssum)

You can read Part One of this super long poem HERE.


Wood (Part 9 : Alyssum)

I stand at the dumpster and I think about how none of it matters in the end : I mean really matters : one day you and I will both be gone and a few people who will also be gone will remember us for a second : geologically even the trees will be forgotten before the rocks will give up the ghost :

I'm thinking about throwing out the frame it was an ex-boyfriend's it held photos of his family and there is that part of me that wants to hold on to even these fractured bits : like that dead tree at the garden with the crown all dried and brittle : why not take it down and get on with it :

The garden I planted on the patio died within a few weeks of starting it I'm convinced that it's because I didn't burn sage but it's probably just that the sun is wrong here : I planted poppies and nasturtiums and morning glory and not a one happened :

My grandmother's both kept gardens : simple and beautiful they dominate the nature of my memories : one with her vegetables and black-eyed susan and zinnia the other with peony and flowing geraniums and mint : both with fruit trees that I do not remember ever producing :

I think about alyssum and their softly ombré colors : purple into white : purple in : I'm again reminded of dogwood and the slightly tinged edges : the color of the inner rings of wood : a dark vein that bleeds out into light blondness :

You run your fingers over those veins for a moment : they are raised and the softer parts between lower with age and less hydration : everything darkens and will bleach of color eventually : dark veins raise and harden like a preserved body :

Can a tree be taxidermied : can the branches be raised into angelic wings and the flesh peeled back to reveal the muscle beneath and all of it mounted on a platform and lit nicely like a ghoulish tableau of what nature could look like if it were a horror movie :

Marigolds

New Mexico gardening is hard.

Which is not a surprise. It's dry. Hot. High altitude. The soil is sandy and rocky.

Things that can grow here must be hardy. Must need little water.

Hollyhocks do well. Roses. Succulents.

Sunflowers.

I try to look at gardening as a sort of haiku. A one-season riff. This is what I want to present this year. Each time it is redone - an edit.

But it feels more like a sprawling oral narrative. A 1001 Nights. Each time the death is reached, there is a rebirth. An attempt to go just once more. To get it right this time.

Without trying our garden is full of mint, sunflowers, hollyhocks, thyme. Our rose bush is covered with blooms. Like snow.

The things I planted did not fare well. The forget-me-nots didn't even sprout. The catnip came up and withered. The marigolds I bought at the farmer's market are burning, though I have managed to keep them blooming through the baking leaves.

I can only seem to grow aloe. The 6 plants I inherited 5 years ago have multiplied into 18 plants that I am in the process of potting to give away.

There is something in there about giving and getting. About the things passed from one to another.

A cultural inheritance. A personal one.

This garden that is growing without my help is not mine. But it is now. These aloe are not mine. But are.

This land, this place, the writing I do. They are all things that are and are not mine.

I hold them for a time. And then have to walk away from them.

For the last two weeks I've been without a computer. I wrote my last book review on paper and typed it into my phone to send to my editor.

To be away.

Returning to the computer. To my writing saved on it. Has felt odd. I always feel strange coming back to old work. It's like a room that is sealed off for years. Dusty, old-smelling. There is something of a time capsule feel about it.

And it never ceases to be jarring.

Who was I when I wrote these lines? Who am I now? Do I still think this way?

I am in the midst of a new draft of my novel. Of a huge edit of a large poetry project. And to be forced to walk away for 2 weeks has left me feeling a little lost in my own thoughts.

How to find that ground again. When it is almost accidental it was found the first time. This is the question. How does one take what has been given, make it over as your own, keep it going. Even when the person giving is a past self.

The last two weeks have made me feel like I have been wallowing in my own introspection a bit. I need to shake that off. So these posts will hopefully become less about myself and more about the world out there.

The one left for us to tend.

Graft

'Basket Tree' by Axel Erlandson.
Created by grafting 6 sycamore trees.

The apricot tree in my backyard is blooming. It was covered in little white flowers this morning and the honey bees were making enough of a racket that I thought they were a generator.

The apricot was cultivated in ancient times, pits of apricot trees have been found in sites dating from the copper age - 7000 years ago - in Greece. It is thought the trees were cultivated much earlier. Due to this, the place of origin is unknown. The Latin name - Prunus armeniaca - which translates as 'Armenian plum' comes from a common belief that the plant is from that part of Eurasia.

Apricots are related to peaches, cherries, and almonds. Amaretto is traditionally made from the apricot seed, not almonds, since they are sweeter. Just like almonds, the seeds of the apricots contain cyanide. But only about 2.5% and so they are not dangerous.

Fruit cultivation is such a strange process. The grafting of trees to hybridize or continue strong root system is fascinating.

That this is how many trees were cultivated thousands of years ago is even more interesting. The idea that you could take two parts of two different trees, stick them together, and they would continue - even thrive - is a leap of thought that we are not necessarily trained to make. One that few of us could come up with today.

That leap is what leads to progress. Culturally or otherwise. It also informs how one gets from point A to point Z in a poem or a work of art. You must go with the words on the page, choose to follow through, hope they arrive intact at the destination.

For more tree stuff you can check out an interview I did over at Poets Touching Trees.

Rust

Gardening is a process.

One that can fail easily. If you forget to water for a few days. If you plant a week too soon - nothing will happen

I'm about to get all kinds of cliched - so clench your jaw - Writing is the same sort of process.

Sometimes it's not right. It's too cold, or dry, or the wrong zone for the seed.

JG and I had a back and forth on Facebook about this very thing on Monday. She is having a hard time with it right now. Rejection letters, a general lack of desire, a consuming real life. These are things that do not lead to healthy plant life.

Let's put it this way:

There was a rainy year in South America and it has led to more than 30% of coffee crops being hit with a fungal infection called 'coffee rust'.

The blight has led to a huge loss in the industry. A possible shortage. Talk of changing generations of precedent for new hybrid coffee plants. Or even to a different crop altogether. To kill the fungus farmers are burning their fields.

In the 18th and 19th century the UK controlled huge coffee plantations in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). You don't drink India or Ceylon varietals at your local cafe because coffee rust claimed enough of those plantations by the mid-19th century to lead to a switch in production. To tea.

And while I didn't use these words with JG, I basically suggested the same thing. Switch production. Re-plow or something.

Take a damn break.

And be OK with that.

Because you should be doing this because you want to. You should be doing the thing you want to, the way you want to. And that means experimenting with what to put where.

How often to water. What time of year is best. Putting out some compost.

And knowing when it's time to let the field go fallow for a season.