The Treekeeper's Tale


    The Treekeeper's Tale


    I have set up house in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood.
    My bed is a mat of pine needles. Cones drop their spirals

    on my face as I sleep. I have the usual flying dreams.
    But all I know when I wake is that this bark is my vessel

    as I hurtle through space. Once, I was rocked in a cradle
    carved from a coast redwood, its lullabies were my coracle.

    I searched for that singing grove and became its guardian.
    There are days when the wind plays each tree

    like a new instrument in the forest-orchestra.
    On wild nights mine is a flute. After years of solitude

    I have started to hear its song. I lie staring at the stars
    until the growth rings enclose me in hoops -

    choirs of concentric colours, as if my tree is remembering
    the music of the spheres. And I almost remember speaking

    my first word, how it flew out of my mouth like a dove.
    I have forgotten how another of my kind sounds.


    Chandelier-Tree


    I find myself staring at the spaces between
    fronds, where pure blue plumes appear,
    the air painting itself on my eye.

    And I see how the trunk doesn't end
    where a person can climb, but continues
    to the redwood's true crown, sky-feathers

    piercing the stratosphere, blue forest
    on blue, some white with lace frills
    of finest cirrus, before the wide canopy

    of night, its invisible leaves
    suddenly alert with stars — how they are
    glimpses of the tree of light.


    Exiled Elm


    My comet-roots trail earth through the dark,
    my trunk swarms with homeless insects

    and from my starry crown seeds
    scatter, searching for new worlds.


    Creation of the Birds


    after the paintingby Remedios Varo

    I paint birds from starlight.
    The harder my art, the stronger their wings -

    solar or lunar feathered, iris-barbed.
    The ultrasonic syrinx,

    drawn from my violin-brush,
    starts to hum when I'm lonely.

    I release them while still wet, their songs
    liquid and light, not meant for base ears.

    Even the nests they weave in our old forests
    are harmonies — temporary mouths for our trees.

    Restless, they embark on great migrations,
    beat against the glass of earth's cage.


    A Dawn Trail


    Each day we come earlier, searching for that hush
        no freeway hum will shatter,

    when the morning wind blows all sound
    into the next creek

    and even our footsteps are muffled
        by a soundproof carpet.

    Deeper into the silence we notice the flutter
        of dropping needles

    soft as feathers from the sky, and a pause
    in which we sense a presence,

    where we begin to see ourselves as part of the forest,
        the thought emerging

    like a white doe who keeps a shy distance,
        at home in the heart of the grove,

    before language, before the human tongue
        took root.


    Portrait of a Coast Redwood Forest with
    Mandolin


    When the first ray pierces my canvas
    I breathe on its shaft, make solar music.
    It's in these early hours of a painting's life
    that my palette becomes a mandolin, its thumb-hole

    a soundhole plucked by brushes. My eye
    darts from foliage to fog. I try to paint
    the deep notes of these ancients,
    how the bass rises from their roots

    and spirals round their rings
    before bursting into saturated light.
    There is lake-black and mud-brown
    a loon-shape brings up from the river bed

    like primordial clay; red dots to raise
    from drums of resonating bark.
    There are greys to draw down from the clouds
    like masks for the tree-gods' faces,

    lightning to cast over their crowns.
    The way they stir just before a storm,
    the crack that opens in the sky — my first view
    of the thunder woods in their electric groves.


    Uprooted Redwood


    My crown once swayed above the stratosphere like a raft,
    each pine-needle tuned to the stars.

    You can hear my leaves humming
    an infinite green fugue. It's as if dawn depends on it,

    for ladders of light to be lowered through violet fog.
    The sun paints an improvised harmony — crescents,

    splashes, zigzags, a lemon lagoon. A blue blot explodes,
    leaving a crater in the sky, cascades of rose roots.

    Morning lies in the gorge, raw as ripped wood.


    The University among the Redwoods,
    Santa Cruz


    They're up there — the students, in their high halls,
    sleeping among the...