A Year of Trees
Bringing language to them
You’re not going to put this fire out with a hose. You’re not going to put it out with a bucket. You’re not going to put it out with an airplane full of retardant. You’re going to get out of the way as quickly as you can. — John Vaillant1
A releasing. Slow, outside, and planted. Moving through whatever is coming for this day and for the next one, for what’s here, leaving, left. The struggle for language as the ground hardens and thaws again. Crucial inward turn when the days turn inward.
I found myself with nothing to say in the graveyards, the fact of them, the swirling symbolism, listening to memories filtered through something close to dismay. The alarm of the living and the lived.
Angry studded truck and a digger parked on a mud-rutted yard. Beside that, raised beds and the skeletons of tomatoes and kale. There will be no resolution, no turn. No sign we’re figuring any of this out. This yard with its retaining-wall landslide. This fence resolute and factual. A man, muddy, walks gingerly in sopping boots. The goal was to seed a narrow concept of bounty, and what grew was individual privilege at all costs. The circling, cycling of these displacements and land thefts, taking over, gobbling up, until extinction.
In her last days my aunt walked and walked, she danced, she sang and laughed, insisting, bodily, on the things she could still do. Seeing and hearing, all sensing, betrayed. She walked until and then past the moment walking failed her.
Wrecked at the bottom and the top, bark split, branch tips frayed. The oily tail fan of the pigeon as it lifts from the sidewalk. Dogwood bright. Sumac candles. Cedar browned from the inside. The number of plants and trees I can identify gives a sense of the license I’ve been given. To want to know the name of something comes from a difficult place. And the number of beings I can name shrinks as the ground hardens.
How to talk about them, to include them in my talking. What lexicon I entrust to this need, and the name that results, the language that answers. That is the move. To sustain through the perennial cutting off, the perennial separation. The delirium, trauma, chaos, grief, and emergency. Grabbing on so as to not be swept away.
Two crows in the tree at the corner as I turn up the hill. They pause their talk and watch as I approach. Trying not to be too distracted by that old capitalist project, the miasma of speeders through unremitting factory housing, that empty bus, this oil stain, this falling-down tree.
Through the chainlink, to the trees in their new pen, I speak two words of Anishinaabemowin. Boozhoo. Minogizhebaawagad. I practiced at my desk at daybreak and two crows came to the window, cocked their heads at me.
I carry these two words to the river, to a gap in private property, where the groundwater travels, that culture I will spend my life learning. I had to pause, make it go dormant, like a seed. I speak two words of Anishinaabemowin, and then three, a little toddler. The water distracts and reflects, its light show, its fallow, what it does with the air, its palette’s breadth. Still I’m not really seeing it. Still it slips by. Estranged relative, or not even. My words don’t touch it. Muffled, sunk. Minogizhebaawagad. The gulls start calling. The big cage of atmosphere. The big book of grief. Visible breath of water. Nibi. A hard, flat surface. Fed through. Water feature. To overlook it. Pay for the view. Loon dip. First words. Southwinds Marine. Mariner’s Haven. Jackpine. Lodgepole pine. Mayday.
Although I've spent most of my life right here in Edmonton and know what to expect, I am still always disconsolate when the slender stems of the yellowed leaves finally lose their grip and descend to earth, I'm always offended by how long it takes for new green ones to appear (say 6 months October to May) and am rarely consoled, except when the sun is out an about and the sky is Alberta-blue and there's been a heavy snowfall. Outside my bedroom window there is a spruce tree (green!) on which the bundles of snow have found purchase. It's awfully pretty...so I revelled in your calendar of unburned trees out there in ON , held my breath along with the two crows as you memorized two words of a new language, "To want to know the name of something comes from a difficult place. " What becomes of a tree-hugger?
BTW John Vaillant spells his name as a French name but pronounces it Valliant. Maybe because he is originally an American?
Lovely , Laurie: "the big cage of atmosphere... of grief."