April 14: Ellen Bryant Voigt, "Landscape, Dense with Trees," My Dad's Trees

Landscape, Dense with Trees

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

When you move away, you see how much depends

on the pace of the days—how much

depended on the haze we waded through

each summer, visible heat, wavy and discursive

as the lazy track of the snake in the dusty road;

and on the habit in town of porches thatched in vines,

and in the country long dense promenades, the way

we sacrificed the yards to shade.

It was partly the heat that made my father

plant so many trees—two maples marking the site

for the house, two elms on either side when it was done;

mimosa by the fence, and as it failed, fast-growing chestnuts,

loblolly pines; and dogwood, redbud, ornamental crab.

On the farm, everything else he grew

something could eat, but this

would be a permanent mark of his industry,

a glade established in the open field. Or so it seemed.

Looking back at the empty house from across the hill,

I see how well the house is camouflaged, see how

that porous fence of saplings, their later

scrim of foliage, thickened around it,

and still he chinked and mortared, planting more.

Last summer, although he’d lost all tolerance for heat,

he backed the truck in at the family grave

and stood in the truckbed all afternoon, pruning

the landmark oak, repairing recent damage by a wind;

then he came home and hung a swing

in one of the horse-chestnuts for my visit.

The heat was a hand at his throat,

a fist to his weak heart. But it made a triumph

of the cooler air inside, in the bedroom,

in the maple bedstead where he slept,

in the brick house nearly swamped by leaves.

____________________

The Upper Peninsula is on the cusp of a spring snowstorm.  Last time I looked, the National Weather Service was predicting 12 to 15 inches of snow.  Of course, those numbers have been changing on an hourly basis all week long.  I am doing what all Yoopers do when it comes to snow:  taking it as it comes, two inches or twenty inches.

The trees around my parents' house are shaking with wind in preparation for the coming storm.  My father planted those trees, just like Voigt's father in the poem.  My father's trees were saplings, small and mid-sized.  Over 40 years, they have grown into a little forest.  When I go to the house, those trees remind me of him--a Motor City guy in love with the wildness of the U. P. 

Saint Marty is thankful this morning for trees.