Missing the forest

Bonsai Tree at The Huntington Gardens

Missing the forest

for the trees
seeing lark
       lichen leaf 

and what’s not seen
that mirrored seep
purpling and writhing
pleading deep I desire

to 
over the 
under the 
through the
to the 
by the 
with the
of the 
                 forest

for the trees
touch to touch

---

It has been teetering on smoke all week with some fires up near the Canadian border. I decided to take the impulse I had to write a somber poem, keep the same three opening words and go in a new direction. 

Someone said “missing the forest for the trees” the other day. Two things immediately sprung to mind: 

1. The complexity of trees and how to ever fully see a tree would mean grasping a large and interconnected picture (sort of working against the original meaning of the phrase). A bonsai Juniper is pictured at the top to show the difficulty of holding a whole tree in one’s mind.

2. The word “for” in that sentence is fascinating and could propel the phrase in many directions. For example, the empathy that is brought to mind when you think of a lone Douglas Fir far from others — to miss the forest on its behalf! Or, imagine a comma: “Missing the forest, for the trees…” At risk of this turning into “The panda eats shoots and leaves … “ I digress. 

Toward the tail end of a panel discussion with Max Porter, Robert Macfarlane and Nigel Cooke, Macfarlane says, “a word in praise of prepositions [...] when used rigidly they sediment a grammar of division and when used well they advocate a grammar of animacy and help us to see the forms of the entanglement that are so complex that we can barely begin to understand them.” 

As a kid, my parents often read me the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. Writing this poem led me to this video of Michael reading the story — a true work of art. The primary refrain of this book is “We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it … oh no, we’ve gotta go through it!” I was struck by what happens if you change the word “through” in this sentence to a different preposition and maybe that spawned this strange little frolic of a poem? Who knows. 

I’m working on reimagining a classic children’s story… stay tuned. May share a snippet in an upcoming post 🙂

 In a recent excerpt from an upcoming Christian Wiman book he shared a quote from Eric C. Banks: 

“However mysterious the mind-body problem may be for us, we
should always remember that it is a solved problem for nature.”

D and I were recently chatting about how touching a tree is being touched back.

Thanks for reading.