Well Rooted

Dec 17 2013

An early snow
and frost barely penetrates.

In the constant soil

in the restful dark

roots lie dormant,
their probing tips
hardened, blunted.
Like exposed nerves
temporarily numb.

While above the snow, on our side
the green earth
has turned sparse, brown

lifeless.
Scarred trunks
rise up into cold dry air,
scarecrow skeletons, with sharpened elbows
frozen through.
Like dead bodies, cryogenically preserved
awaiting
some miracle cure.

I forget that most of the tree
might just as well exist
on an alien planet
we have not yet visited.
Or imaged, even
with some unmanned probe,
some Voyager
to inner space.

Because just as the trees' visible tips
taper up
its roots spread down and out,
a vast network

convoluted, interconnected
intricately knitting the soil.
Which apparently talk,
trade nutrients, signals
direction.
Are chemical warriors,
who can work together
fight to the death.

Ask an artist to draw a tree
and he will miss

most of it.

Even more, the poet,

whose dreamy version
would let them die of thirst,
topple
in a minor breeze.

How little we see,
how much
we think we have mastered.
But come spring
resurrected trees
will be green, and full.
Just imagine,

escaping winter

while stripped to the bone

immobilized.

A subterranean creature
that makes its living

eating light.

I wrote this after reading Michael Pollan's brilliant piece in the latest New Yorker, The Intelligent Plant (Dec 23 & 30, 2013).

He talks about the amazing abilities of plants, only recently being recognized (Charles Darwin's usual prescience notwithstanding). He talks about he nature of neural processing, which leads him into more metaphysical speculation about intelligence, learning, intent, self-consciousness, and even free will. (I loved his line "the epiphenomenon of consciousness that we call 'free will'".)

Toward the very end of the piece, he refers to the UBC forest ecologist Suzanne Simard's work with networked intelligence in the form of the "underground web of mycorrhizal fungi which connects their roots to exchange information and even goods ...the wood-wide web(!)". This hidden world of trees was the start of this poem.

Our blindness to this subterranean world is a perfect metaphor for our resistance to new world views. And in this particular case, the resistance of conventional scientists to accept a radically different way of processing information: one that is modular and networked, not brain-centred; that operates on a time scale that makes it impossible for us to see; and that somehow learns and remembers and communicates more like the autonomic nervous system in our gut than the collection of neurons in our brain. Which reminds me of another great line, one among many I could quote from Pollan's article: "He (the Italian plant physiologist Stefano Mancuso) estimates that a plant has three thousand chemicals in its vocabulary, while, he said with a smile, 'the average student has only seven hundred words.'" (I wonder if the usually meticulous New Yorker fact-checked that one. Really, just 700?!!) The pitfalls of anthropomorphizing are well demonstrated in my shift from "which" to "them", and then to "who" and "creature". Although as a poet and not a scientist, personification of inanimate objects is hardly controversial, and so shouldn't be with trees.

This is another of my many "tree" poems. In fact, I recall a version of this particular tree/root poem from a few years ago. It was about a kid drawing a picture of a tree, who typically forgets that most of it is underground: in which this blindness becomes a metaphor for childhood naïveté, as well as for denial in the complexities of family life. Or, more broadly, it was a poem about hiding in plain sight.

My ending is lifted from a quote contained in Pollan's article: “'Why would a plant care about Mozart?' the late ethnobotanist Tim Plowman would reply when asked about the wonders catalogued in The Secret Life of Plants. 'And even if it did, why should that impress us? They can eat light, isn’t that enough?'”