Arboretum
This arboretum is filled with remnants and restorations. Remnants are reflections, what’s left of a glacier’s goodbye. Restorations are expanses trying to heal their damage. Sometimes, restoration is a lie. Sometimes, a place is so damaged that only something new can be created there.
*
Here’s what doesn’t matter and I can’t stop imagining: the sound of shots and not believing this is going to happen just before it is the last impossibility to be certain of.
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If, as Adrienne Rich has written, “A poem is not about; it is out of and to,” then I can almost convince myself I’m not writing about two murdered friends. If I am writing about two murdered friends, then I can almost convince myself I don’t feel what Traci Brimhall calls “the need to make death lovely.” There’s nothing lovely in my imagination now without the unlovely vanishing point where memories of them lead. Dear friends—
*
In the remnant sedge meadow, cattails have invaded, the result of decades-old dredging. Remnants are in constant need of salvaging from this kind of overtaking. In a nearby wetland patch, invasive buckthorn has been removed from the hoped-for prairie. Is this supposed to be lovely, this exigent attempt at protection-turned-repair?
As blue abandons the light because the atmosphere scatters the sun, the first few moments of a false sunrise and the movement of a woman’s arm are supposed to be lovely. On another ordinary day, we’d call the red that’s left of sun lovely.
*
If I see, as Carolyn Forché does, “our relation to others as one of infinite obligation: to stand with them in the hour of need, even abject and destitute, in supplication and without need of response,” have I failed in my obligation? I am not a witness and cannot dwell on supplication long. My grief is a safety net over an abyss. I’m standing on a glass floor I won’t fall through. There are no wounds here if I use no line breaks.
Carolyn Forché is talking about survival, and her line of thinking extends: “—if description were possible, of world and its sufferings, then the response would be that smile, or rather something resembling it, passing over what had once been her face.” What had once been her face is too lovely for me to think about in a field where “historical remains are strewn,” in this arboretum “where that-which-happened remains present.” I’m trying to understand the difference between historical and individual remains. History has a way of foreshortening the what-had-once-been along orthogonal lines of that-which-happened.
*
In a book called Leavings, Kate Siklosi has made poems by sewing snippets of paper, torn from a book, to and into leaves. I’m affixing my words to the dead with thread the color of this sentence. I’d like to sew one remnant to another to create something new. One of Siklosi’s leaves reads: “This is the beginning of / hoping against hope, willing / the icy river cannot be told.” In this arboretum, there is a lake beyond hope with nothing to tell.
*
An arboretum is about grasses as much as it is about trees. Dear friends, prairie people, you’d burned big bluestems and dropseed bunchgrasses before—is that description lovely? The florets of these grasses are called spikelets
*
When Sunita Puri describes dying as “a certain cadence and tempo, a recognizable prelude to an infinite stillness,” it’s lovely. She’s a palliative care physician; she’s seen a lot of people die. In her description, the beforeness of death is well defined; it takes time and allows for expectation.
Expectation is hope’s realistic cousin; it harbors more conviction. It requires patience. The elk died out here more than a century ago. A collapse. They’ve been reintroduced farther north. A restoration, an anticipation.
Palliative care doesn’t care about cause, only about suffering in the hour of need. If, as Sunita Puri writes, “There was nothing to do but be there,” then I’m the eleventh-hour cattail invading a memory. I have an old message from my murdered friend about palliative care; it was her new area of expertise when she wrote to me. She was interested in learning to bear witness to the cadence before stillness. I’m the dreadful buckthorn overtaking a remnant; my heartwood is deep orange. There was nothing to do; there was nothing to do but be there. I am back to the sharp sound of what-had-once-been.
*
Though there are trees in the oak savannas of the arboretum, it was too early for leaves, so branches were cracks in the view between earth and sky. There’s a stretch somewhere nearby where oaks have given room underneath for hemlock and yellow birch. The night dipped below freezing. It was overcast, and the light wind hardly changed speed or direction. There’s a wooden bench there now for contemplation, a place holder for the way one of my friends could say something serious and laugh to himself at the same time.
*
Adrienne Rich writes, “Art is a way of melting out through one’s own skin,” but I’m not the one bleeding. Here’s the thought that takes the place of that-which-happened: what would I have been afraid of—losing the person I loved most or dying myself? Here’s why it doesn’t matter: both things are true. Separating one death from the other is an attempt at sense-making. Separating two from that year’s 45,222 gun deaths—the 20,958 gun homicides—is an exercise. These numbers make nonsense of lives that once were.
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Undergrowth is the story of sunlight melting through tree canopy. This understory tries to leaf out while it has the chance to recreate itself. Remnants are defined by the loss that surrounds them. Every restoration is partial.
