Dead Tree

Dec 24 2019

The dead tree

that had dropped its leaves

before summer had barely begun

now looks like all the others,

naked limbs

that branch and thin

and stand fully exposed,

as if stoically shivering

in this bitter prairie cold.

How sensible, to be dormant

in such an unforgiving winter,

to make yourself small

against the lethal power of wind

the unbearable weight of snow.

Look close, though, and you can see their buds are set

prepared for spring's revival;

skeleton trees

that merely impersonate death.

Except for this one

which I should have cut down last summer.

In the democracy of winter

in the season of drift

a lover of trees

flirting with hope

and lulled by wilful blindness.

The dogs and I often walk through a neighbourhood schoolyard where, in some excess of environmental zeal several years ago, they planted a number of trees. All the same, in the same location; yet one poor runty tree barely produced any leaves, and now looks definitively dead. But they left it standing; and now in winter, when all the trees are leafless and looking forlorn, you could imagine it like all the others, simply dormant.

I love trees, have planted a lot of them, and can hardly bear to even cut a branch, let alone cut one down. And who knows if a tree that appears dead might surprise us in spring: that its surviving roots, deep underground where frost doesn't penetrate, may in fact be gaining strength, and ready for one final heroic efflorescence. I have one maple that that seems to be on the verge of dying; but instead of removing it, I've radically pruned, and each spring it somehow keeps struggling back. Late in the season, but clearly alive. So it's now more a bonsai bush than a tree; but its leaves are healthy enough, and it's gorgeous in fall.

This is the southern extremity of the boreal forest, not prairie. And I could as easily have written some variation of “arctic” cold, or “miserable” cold, or “persistently bitter” cold. In the end, I chose prairie cold not only because the other choices didn't sound as well, but because I love the way it reinforces that image of exposure: the flat bald prairie, where a rare tree bears the full brunt of weather. The irony here is that the definition of “prairie” is a grassland plain, relatively treeless: it's not the flatness that makes it prairie (because the prairies aren't, in fact, flat), it's the paucity of trees.

It has also been very much the opposite of an unforgiving winter: unusually mild. Too mild, for my taste. And, I very much fear, a harbinger of climate change: wetter, warmer, messier winters; with lots of nasty freeze and thaw. Which is unpleasant for me, although hardly what should really concern us about global heating. Still, there are and will be cold snaps; so if accuracy matters, I can still claim it.

I've written before that if I let myself, every poem would be about death. I'm not sure – even though I use dead in both the first line and the title, then skeleton trees and death later on – this is that morbid a poem. Instead, it could easily be argued that it's about life: the renewal of spring; the possibility that this apparently dead tree may just end up rewarding the writer's hope.