It rained for most of Friday, and yesterday the weather played games with us. It was warm in the morning, and I took my walk in short sleeves with a rain jacket tied around my waist. It was still warm when we all left the house at eleven, but it was cold when we came out of the store in the early afternoon. The sky that had cleared during my walk was now all knotted clumps of cloud that pushed their way slowly across the sky. We could see no light around the edges.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil
The grandeur came later, when I was sitting at this kitchen table, trying (again) to grade some papers. The children were happily preoccupied Elsewhere, and I looked up from Ethan’s report on Hans Holbein to see low red light coming through the far trees. The cloud cover had broken open there, apparently, and the setting sun exclaimed a silent benediction over the day. I looked east: the tree trunks and needles of the loblolly pines were on fire.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
I’d like to say that I live for moments like these: when the quiet, natural world seizes my attention with its quiet, stunning beauty. I note the sky on our drive to school every morning. If nothing else, the need (or not) for sunglasses demands some attention. My mind is focused on being on time, on the conversation or quarrels of my children, on the music we are listening to, on the day ahead. Sometimes we notice something outside, but our drive is so much the same.
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell
Sometimes– at least once, perhaps– in the course of the day, I am able to raise my eyes from the immediate demands around me (on any given day, my day is spent alternatively at and then in front of and around my classroom, so that my desk, at the end of the day, is layered with open texts and last-minute submissions, somebody’s late-work, and paper-clipped piles of assignments) and look out the window. I look beyond the sidewalk leading to the gym and beyond the lawn we are trying to grow and I see the trees and am able– in that moment– to see what the wind might be doing, and whether it is (again today or not) bending the tops of the trees. But my windows face north, so no sunlight makes its way across my classroom. Fluorescent light, no matter its efficiency, always has a sickly effect.
the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
I can’t help but notice the irony: that when I looked for a book on my shelves here that housed this poem, I could find none, having taken them to school. Instead, I had to look the poem up on-line. No pages to turn, no crinkled thinness of anthology, no book-smell from a tome long waiting, no getting distracted by the wrong page and another poem that would lead to another and another that would lead to who knows where?
It was Robert Frost who taught me to notice the oak trees who never let go all their leaves in autumn. They hold the rust-colored clusters fast, so that the oak itself is easy to pick out in the woods during the winter. But last year and this I’ve discovered another one that holds its leaves through the winter. These leaves are paler and furled; they look like conical bits of parchment hanging near the tree’s waist. I see them on my walks and, on my drive to work, I spot them from the corner of my eye in the woods near the neighborhood of the school.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
I finally plucked one of these leaves as I finished my walk two weeks ago. I attended to how the leaf grew from the stem and, upon arriving home, looked it up in our book, Trees: A Guide to Familiar American Trees. The leaf, though dead, was damp with some residual life. I had to unfurl it and unfurl it again. Its rust-brown spine divides it neatly along its length, with finer veins extending upward across its width at nearly forty-five degree angles. And between these, numberless, the tiniest, palest veins extending up and down at ninety-degree angles. These fragile lines start out straight and then, at their ends, curve slightly. They remind me, somehow, of very old fingers, arthritic, reaching toward each other.
American Beech is a stately and beautiful tree. Our native species is best known. Copper Beech and Weeping Beech are European varieties which are often planted as ornamentals in parks. Beech prefers rich bottomland or upland soils. It tolerates shade and gradually dominates the forest growth. Its distinctive smooth gray bark, long, pointed buds and strongly veined leaves are characteristic. The fruit, a triangular nut, is eaten by mammals and birds. The wood– reddish, close-grained, and hard– is used for furniture, woodenware, barrelmaking, and veneer. Height: 60 to 80 feet. Beech family.
I have pressed the leaf in the tree book, where it sits between its page and the opposite, “American Holly.” The leaf is brittle now and very nearly flat, except that somehow, in drying out here, it is somewhat rumpled between its veins. Now, when I see these pale leaves curled like skirts around a tree trunk, I know this is a beech tree.
I can’t help but notice this tree with its light leaves amongst the dun-colored trunks, and I will freely confess to you that, when I see a beech tree in the winter, I never think of its fruit or the usefulness of its wood. Never. Because I know, too, about those rust-colored veins which are invisible to me as I drive past, those veins etched with the utmost tenderness in the skin of the leaf.
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
“God’s Grandeur,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Trees: A Guide to Familiar American Trees by Herbert S. Zim, PhD. and Alexander C. Martin, PhD.
