Poem: We Count Them All in Rings

We Count Them All in Rings

I am old growth; part of a woods, not a farm.
In the woods, the old are not cut down mid-life,
leaving flattened evidence of once a tree.
In the woods, there are no horizontal abbreviations of life
to stand on, and wonder how long it might have gone.
We crowd out, aspiring, and if our days are many,
we spread out, reaching for each other.

In the woods, there are no stumps.
There are old trees, standing still, giving back
what they have used, until wind and weakness
take them down to earth; the fallen old.
Having reached for the light, finally we fall
to rest and make home for small things,
for the mossy things. In the old woods
there are no stumps: there are traces.

I am old growth, like the old growth I knew
when I was a boy, where the forest farmers
had not yet come to make stubble of the woods,
where the fallen old altered the way to go,
and where we followed where deer had gone,
where the woods allowed us to go.

We did not know the shape of the land
except where the old ones had fallen from the sky,
and where creeks ran low and away.
The woods hid horizon, except sometimes
where the land dropped away as if it too had fallen;
older still than the woods we learned on foot.

On foot we learned the ways of time,
and walked among the older generations,
silent at what they had become before we came.
They circled the slow years about themselves,
ring by ring, until wind and weariness brought them down,
where they lay, in and under the moss, returning.

I am old wood, standing amid the older still,
and the younger yet, one of the generations of woods,
accepting the seasons that filter into the woods,
enjoying them for as long as they come, here
where we count them all in rings.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog