Seasons of Shade

June 22 2015

The big maples

are as high as the house.

Saplings, when they were planted

on a fresh expanse of lawn,

leaves sparse

stems like spindly wands.

When I was so much younger

and they were thin, but strong;

the supple resilience

with which all of us start.

Now, their canopies touch,

a cool shelter

enclosing the house.

Three trees, forming a gentle arc

of dappled leaves

filtered sun.

Thick roots

knuckle-up near the base of their trunks.

Nicked by lawnmowers, calloused by weather

they wear their scars like hardened men;

tough bark,

armoured against

the known world.

While underneath, there is a mirror tree

which has never seen the light;

roots radiating out

that divide

divide again.

Tenaciously clinging

feeling their way.

In fall, so many leaves to rake.

The give and take of nature;

summer shade

autumn chores.

And all winter, standing naked

in frozen dormancy.

Reduced to bare wood

they are skeletons, disinterred.

But unlike bleached old bones

undergo rebirth;

trees, that will surely outlive me

counting up the years.

Bigger and bigger,

through seasons of shade

seasons of work.

One small change near the end of the poem seemed to pull it all together for me: when counting down the years became counting up, the usual diminishment of age was turned just enough off-centre to call back to the vitality of the trees -- their bigness, their persistent growth, their longevity. It's as if what you plant -- or create -- in your brief lifetime confers a kind of posterity. Or at least the consolation that life goes on. In the poem, I think the personification of the trees helps with this identification: the roots become knuckles, the trees are hardened men, and the bare branches are skeletons; they feel and cling and are reborn. Even in the opening stanza, this personification is subtly present: in the conflation of the young narrator with the even younger trees.

I like the sense of alternation, regularity, predictable cycles; which is exactly how nature operates. While in human affairs, we tend to think of progress, of history as an upward sloping line. I'm reminded of the Biblical verse, made famous by the song (the Byrds, 1965): " ...to everything there is a season; turn, turn, turn ... ". From this point of view, the give and take of nature becomes a key line; and the ending is a perfect coda. And it's the weight of that same verse which gave the poem its title, easily pushing out all contenders.

The mirror image, the depiction of the whole tree, can be taken any way you like. Because when we imagine trees, see trees, draw trees, we invariably ignore an entire half. It's as if what we don't see doesn't exist. It reflects our conceit that we know how the world works. Or perhaps you can take this as referring to dark underbellies, or doppelgängers, or the essential and persistent mysteries we will never unearth.

I'm as sure as can be that a search of my archive will turn up a very similar poem -- or poems. Because as I wrote, I felt I'd written this before. But, as usual, I hope that time and practice have honed my craft. And that if I do turn it up, this one comes out best.

(Just a short note on a technicality, a choice I made that may or may not work. In the first stanza, I think it would have been clearer -- and perhaps more grammatically correct -- to have said but WITH the supple resilience/ with which all of us start. On the other hand, the 2 with(s) become such a mouthful, I thank anyone would trip over their tongue trying to say these lines out loud -- and all poetry should be written to be recited. Bad enough having to use which: a picky word that often involves the kind of plodding explication that's more prose-like than poetic. Trouble is, if I dispense with which the line becomes we all started out WITH; and I hate ending a line -- let alone a stanza -- on as weak a part of speech as a preposition.)