Why Old Men Plant Trees

...a poem

Photo Cliff Scholz

It’s a knee-high oak,
the merest stick of a tree, planted 
because I’ve seen enough to know
the ground here floods each spring, 
and so these dormant buds
will awaken, when they awaken,
where a swamp oak likes to grow.
 
When I spoke my plans to others,
this is what I said:
“It’s the right tree for this place,”
…not that I’d near certainly be dead
before it reached the age
at which I stand before it now.
 
But then, do we ever see 
the end of anything? 
Or even the start?
When, for example, 
can we really say
begin the lives of the children 
to whom we lovingly attend? 
And from where come our
kindness, love, our good works, 
and all our art? Then again, 
even when people and things 
are lost to our embrace
and stirred into the world,
they leave a trace.
 
Once, 
near my piano teacher’s house, age ten
I met a man of many years 
who pointed to the elms 
that on both sides lined the street,
branches touching 
high above our heads.
As a boy, he and his father
had planted them, he said.
The man himself stood gray 
as weathered wood,
yet even as a child, 
I grasped something
of the meter, the tempo
and the grand movements 
toward which he gestured 
like a maestro 
with his arms outstretched: 
I saw the silent symphony.

Clearly, that encounter still resounds.
But what about this slender hope
here planted at my feet? I’ve learned
that measuring the outsides of things 
from end to end is good 
for carpentry and cordwood
or, I suppose, when crafting
spruce and willow into fiddles.
That’s fine, that’s fine…
…it’s just that life, unbroken,
measures things from middles.
 
And so, for this small tree and me
to be complete, 
to see one spring together, yes,
that will do it, or just one day,
ONE DAY!
or even perhaps this brief now
in which I kneel again before it
to firm its roots, and hold
with muddy hands
the long, deep chord of earth,
as one would pray.