The reach of words

A few things I’ve been reading the past few days have coalesced into a theme of sorts, which might be coincidental or might just be the point of having a brain - to draw distinctions and relations between information - which is to say to create meaning, personal meaning while on the planet.

So, it’s about trees.

On April 27th, which happened to be Arbor Day, we learned in an email that the school had scheduled the removal of the oak tree that has anchored the corner of Academy and Sand Streets for over 100 years. That prompted me to go looking for early photos of it. That is it below, second oak from the left as pictured in the 1913 school catalog.

This news also sent me looking for a poem I wrote about that tree in 1993, early in my teaching career. "Charter Oak" was published in a school newsletter of that year. I have included it at the end of this post.

Also, this past weekend I read Gary Paulsen’s Woods Runner which is set in the wilds of the Northeast at the time of the American Revolution. Along with the story itself, Paulsen does a great job of establishing just how remote, untouched, and pervasive the woods were at that time.  I love the image of this paragraph:

The forest was unimaginably vast, impenetrable, mysterious and dark. His father told him that a man could walk west for a month, walk as fast as he could, and never see the sun, so high and dense was the canopy of leaves.

And then yesterday I was typing up the daily entries in Darwin Craig’s 1902 journal when up popped Arbor Day again, in 1902:

Friday - Today was Arbor Day and after some exercises school was closed for the day. The singing and speaking was very good. Mr. Haven gave a short talk, Among other things he spoke of Mr. Morton, who died not long ago, as the man who started the custom of planting trees on Arbor Day. He said this day ought to be a sort of memorial day to him.
Mr. Gibson conducted the devotional exercises, and at the invitation of Mr. Baird, spoke to the students. He said we are all like trees in a certain sense; growing upward and downward. Our upward growth is our beauty, our outward appearance, what the world sees. Our downward growth, our roots, what our real character is. He said there were some who let their temptations, their temper, their passions conquer them - they were blown over by the first wind. There are others who do not make such an outward show, digging away at their studies, who are sending their roots down deep, who are strong and are not blown over by the wind. He told us to be strong, true, affectionate. To aim our ambitions high, very high.

And lastly today, reading over last weeks copies of the NY Times, a story about trees thriving inside the abandoned farm silos of the midwest. Poignant stuff after a poignant week.

Charter Oak

Against this warm expanse of wall
this oak expands, a florid burl,
in contra-pose to brick, its ageless foil.
Both are venerable, poised -
a kind of native stock.
Each morning they confront me
with the weight of their bearing.

Today the oak is luminous -
its many hands applaud the season
and their own passage.
Sprouting from roots
imbedded beneath
the foundation of the school,
it anchors this building in the community
as sure as any charter.
It flourishes.

I am struck today, however,
by the sheer scale of its stature
and I wonder
how it has managed to match
the building’s growth with its own;
cornered as it is
my macadam and stone.
But then I recall jonquils
that lavish off our kitchen porch.
There, the white-washed wall magnifies
the slim Spring sun to cultivate
the snowy miracle of their profusion.

And so this school has fueled a flowering -
reflecting some special glow
upon the tree generation after generation
so that even as it grows away
and insinuates itself
into the reaches of the world,
it is nourished at its core
by an unseen radiance
as renewable as new leaves on old limbs.


P.S.