Dendrochronology

Biologists are watching closely as the blazes encroach on old-growth redwood trees in Northern and Central California, where some giants are more than 1,000 years old and are known by individual names. — NPR, August 23, 2020


My friend from California asks how a tree perceives time
as we walk a forest of second and third growth trees.

Down the road in Snoqualmie, an old growth cut lies in state, enshrined
next to ancient train engines.

Markers of human time scar its rings: the Norman Conquest, the Kittyhawk flew, WWII.

I’ve known my friend for several rings of a fairly young tree. Our time marked in decades
of scorched love, then marriage branching children.

We admire a Douglas Fir stump, the moss clustering in pockets. A hemlock sapling roots
from its base, nursing toward the sky.

Recently I asked my oldest son and his wife about baby names. They are not pregnant.
I am fishing for a way of claiming.

The oldest living redwoods are named after generals,
even as the monuments to these men are removed.

The only female Sequoia, ‘Mother of the Forest’ rose 323 ft high until they stripped and shipped
60 tons of her bark for the 1855 New York Crystal Palace exhibition.
A 1908 fire cremated her.

Redwoods can survive wildfires. Even fully charred trees can sprout again
from buds lying dormant beneath bark.

And the truly dead, those burnt to the core, cut to the stump sheathed in forest green velvet
evening gowns will nurse young seedlings into trees bearing names.

A few years back, I drove through the Redwoods on my way to my son’s wedding, stopping
in San Francisco to see the friend who walks with me now.

Since then, millions of forest acres have burned. I can’t even begin to name all that loss.

If this were an environmental poem, I’d worry its burning edges.
I’d conjure bees, bats and earthworms. I’d recycle my children.
Let them squirm out of the earth after a rain.
Let them spring up, sprout green and grassy.
Let them know ice.

My friend and I worry about our children and their unborn, unnamed children.

After our walk, we’ll drink wine and discuss the books we’ve read, made on recycled paper—
from trees logged long ago.

On NPR, they say that the younger generation of redwoods is at risk. The old ones, 95% gone.
What remains is new and denser

like the housing development my son and his wife have moved into.
Or the ones being built here, along the Snoqualmie River.

When we walk along the river, we see trees tagged in a forest.
For survival or slaughter we wonder.

The younger forests burn hotter and fire spreads more easily.

Several wildfires have been sparked by gender reveal parties—pink or blue fireworks to signal
the unborn has a gender, perhaps a name.

I know I used the pronoun she for ‘Mother of the Forest’ but I meant it.
Not every living thing needs a gender or a title to exist.
Or to be remembered long after death.

My friend stops to photograph the trees—the fractured light, the spectrum of green.

I recently read about the symbiosis between trees. How a Douglas fir under stress signals
to a nearby Ponderosa pine through the fungal network.
I imagine a forest floor of conversation, the hum of root and tinder.

I always imagined my father as a Douglas fir, his sturdy presence, until he died.
What my father would say—the smoke of wildfires clotting our skies, warnings
mushrooming.

Now the Foo Fighter lyric It’s times like these time and time again seeds my brain. I think it’s
time to let nature take over, to write the ending.

The Neighbors Request a Tree Removal


between us space petals fall
like tears across the drive garden
I carry severed
lilacs by the armful as if an injured
child too much for the neighbors to bear
the violet explosion of flower
the breeze dragging perfume
through their blinds.