Trees

Thanks to my cousin Todd for introducing me to this poem many years ago as part of his Bar Mitzvah program. I never let it go.

Howard Nemerov, “Trees,” from Mirrors and Windows (1958):

“To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one’s own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One’s Being deceptively armored,
One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word –
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also -- though there has never been
A critical tree -- about the nature of things.

In Response to Your Poems, Including "Wind"

Ah, I am a consummate voyeur.
I read the above and the afore-referred
And all I hear again and again
Is When?

What song served as your soundtrack
The day these were composed?
Which refrigerator-magnet poet
Were you out to beat
When you allowed these words to meet?

How long and how blonde and how straight
Was your hair
What gel, spray or fruit-scented mousse
Held it loosely in place
While that Wind whispered itself into you
And coaxed that one-sided
Smile from your face?

I know you might think it should be enough
For me to see likeness and loveliness
And loving-kindness
And kindred-spiritedness
And I do.

But I also know that these words
Don't belong to any of us now
Or ever.
They belong to feelings that seek us
When songs and partings and
Fluid and dust penetrate our surface
They don't come from
The things that hurt us
But neither pass entirely through.

There was inspiration, and gestation
And a painful crown and birth
On a very specific Earth
Someone was there in the room
With you, when you wrote them down.
Don't expect these words alone to remember
The miracle of their arrival.
You don't own them anymore.
You stand over there now,
(or over here, I don't mind the warmth)
With your inciting moment -
Your consolation prize
While I get to decide
If I will own them too.