Güd wrtr

The tree is saying things, in words before words.
It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.
It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.
It says: There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find.
It says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

—from Richard Powers’ “The Overstory” © 2018, W.W. Norton & Company,
winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

•••

Trees, connected underground
by vast webs like rooted corpuscles,
move information through their

slender, entangled threads,
Earth’s natural microfibers, feeding
each other, communicating.

Listen, they wordlessly telegraph
to those listening. There’s something
you need to hear.

They want to remind us of our
common source, humans and trees,
like oaks whose roots entwine

below ground, loving arms giving
and receiving in equal measure.
When a tree knows it’s about to die,

it disperses its essence, its energy
through its mycelia—fungal cells
interacting with root cells, feeding

the soil, silently decomposing plant
material, turning it into carbon
dioxide—to share with other trees.

The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It is saying, Take what I have,
this sun, this water, eternal questions
that you above-grounders hold, too,

for we are the same being, reinventing
ourself again and again, starting over.
We learn; we remember; we share.

The tree recites an ode:
We absorb your presence;
after each footfall crosses our surface,

we leap up in a merry dance,
our micro-movements ingesting
what you leave behind.

The tree’s soundtrack echoes,
the voice of a thriving collective:
We are one. Remember.

We are one.

(for the crew of Southwest flight 3361,
Sacramento to Seattle, July 24, 2025)

We rise in this soaring silver bird,
aiming upupup, to a height humans
cannot achieve unless encased
in such a magnificent beast.

And I think of the early years of air
travel, when attendants were young
nurses, Julie told me, she who flew
for American in 1940, employed to
serve drinks, offer a pillow and care
for those woozy from flying so high.

All of 10,000 feet in those days,
she said, maybe 14, cabins
not yet pressurized, all souls aboard
feeling the weight of their lungs
struggling for air, cruising at altitudes
higher than terrestrial bodies
were designed for.

Still, in these times of even higher flight
that make it easier on passengers
and crew, the gyroscope in my brain
always tilts on takeoff, liquid sloshing
from hemisphere to hemisphere,
until the trap door at the top of my skull
opens, and I rise,

I rise with the lift of weightless
feathers burnished bronze,
as I imagine I will one day
when I no longer need this body
and these great silver wings
to fly.

When it’s your birthday month,
gifts show up daily—often
a photo card emailed with
some version of your face
(so many years of face to
choose from) on it.

And one day you come home
to find a box with a bright blue
hair dryer waiting for you,
the older one having lost
its high speed, to which
you can relate.

Because this is what he does,
the man who says he loves you
in a hundred ways: He makes
sure you have your favorite
hair dryer—two of them—
at his house and yours,

all the hot air you’d ever need,
with your smile on electronic cards
that remind you how long
he has loved your aging face,
how long you’ve loved his,
the best gift of all.

•••

(Mahalo, Dickie… aloha nui loa)

…sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing…

—Galway Kinnell, from “St. Francis and the Sow”

•••

All the years I stood before students
in classrooms, I reminded myself

that I was not their ultimate teacher—
though I doled out assignments and grades.

And, if I remembered, I’d say that my job
was to teach best what I most needed

to learn—often nothing about writing
or putting out a newspaper or publishing

a literary journal, not how to write an essay
or a poem or make a photograph.

The best teaching, I learned, is often what
what we reteach ourselves—that we have

voices worthy of the page, even if we
imagine that we don’t. That our words

matter. That we are lovely beings,
coming just as we are to the world,

to the table, to sit with each other
and listen, as someone reads,

and we watch them flourish
from within, giving us the great gift

of themselves, which now becomes
part of ourselves, a sweet blessing

as we hold their words gently,
listening to each other as we

bloom and bloom again.

(for Gail and Amy)

Odd things appear
on the kitchen windowsill—
this week two apricot pits that,
if I had a compost pile, should go there,
or perhaps tossed with the loose tea
in the flowerbed where the rangy volunteers
might find some sustenance
in my leavings.

I watch the golden pits dry more each day,
skeletal ovals that produced something
luscious from Gail’s tree in the backyard
where we gather to exercise on Tuesday
mornings, this place of abundance
that she and Amy have made together.

I savored those apricots, wanting to
bite into them at their peak of sweetness,
feeling their gold fuzz on my lips,
not imagining that a week later
I’d still have the essence of what
made them, pearls from people
who share what grows around them,
whose arms, to my surprise,
open upon my arrival,
and mine open, too.

Recall, friend,
the thaw, the lift
of elaborate freeze,

the throb of salt,
the steam
of belong.

Chant the cycle
of ache, the curl
of caress.

How the blaze
flew into overwhelm,
with no regard

for you, who gave
all to the one
who would abscond

with your heart.

•••

(for Deborah Meltvedt—my wicked trivia queen-poet friend who
loves to play with words, with stunning results—on her birthday.)

(for Donna and our parents)

I never expected to see it,
much less run across the road
on a trip home through
the mountains,

but came upon it veering off
Omo Ranch Road, this forested
piece of property our parents
bought decades ago,

sold to the neighbors
after our mother died,
a parcel I saw only once
upon a long time ago.

But there it was:
Slug Gulch Road, the green sign
proclaimed, aiming tree-high
below the pines.

And as the one behind
the wheel in what had been
my mother’s car, I said,
“Gotta see this,”

though I didn’t know where
their former five acres lay.
Still, faith drives more often
than I do, and when the road

wound past the neighbors’
name on a mounted sign,
I knew that the pines stretching
skyward next door

and the soil in which they
grew once had our parents’
names embedded in it. I
stopped, got out, took photos

of the new “no trespassing”
sign, the reminder that we have
no claim to this land—nor
do we want to.

But squinting into the sun
fireballing through the trees
on a summer afternoon, I
wasn’t sure what cosmic forces

had conspired to bring us together
here, only that we had somehow
gathered in this spot for just
a moment,

before I drove on
into the rest of this life,
the one they gave me,
the one I thank them for

again and again.

In the beauty of holiness,
like dew from the womb of the morning,
in silence and mystery,
I have begotten you.

—verse adapted from Psalms 110

•••

Beauty arrives every day,
the holiest of things shrouded

in silence and mystery, emerging
from the womb of the morning

where we cannot see—unlike those
whose vision enlivens in the dark,

the owl sitting sentinel, ready
to push off from its perch

to hunt what moves in the night.
The bats that do likewise,

then return to their lair to sleep
when the sun appears.

Any number of creatures
do their best work at night,

in the sheltering space of
shadows, while other

daytime beasts bask in
the fresh light birthed daily,

all of us created by what has
begotten us, the very definition

of silence and mystery.

•••

(for Joan Stockbridge)

Dear Mr. Ross:

I wish I could have been there
a century ago, sitting in what I imagine
was your decidedly un-hip apartment,
you brainstorming from a sprawling,
padded armchair, your wife Jane
at the typewriter—the two of you
birthing a magazine with input from
assorted writer and artist friends.

I fancy myself among your hip crowd,
which, of course, you did not call yourselves,
because you weren’t yet the literati
of New York, the ones anyone who was
anyone wanted at their parties.

I’d have given anything to sit next to
Mrs. Parker, as you called Dorothy, even
if she hit me with one of her zingers,
and listen to Mr. Benchley joyfully trade
clever lines with Mr. Woollcott. And over
there, quietly in the corner, Andy White,
the wizard of short essays, still decades
away from penning Charlotte, the spider,
and his beloved Katharine, the sterling
fiction editor, who shaped some of
the best writers of the 20th century.

And if, by some chance, I could have
had a word with you, I’d have asked
if there might be a spot for me on
your soon-to-be beloved New Yorker,
the magazine destined to weather
a whole century, the best of the best,

whether you could foresee it or not,
your dream come true, one that
so many of us admire to this day.

Sincerely yours,

Jan Haag

•••

Harold Ross (a high school dropout-turned-newspaperman from Colorado who read dictionaries and Fowler’s “Modern English Usage” for pleasure) founded The New Yorker magazine with his wife and co-editor Jane Grant (the first woman reporter in The New York Times city room) in 1925. That was after Ross had been to war and edited the Army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, after which he served as editor of three other New York magazines.

The New Yorker thrived under Ross’s leadership until his death in 1951, becoming a source of in-depth reporting, political and cultural commentary, fiction, poetry and humor, which it maintains to this day.

When putting up a fence, consider adding
a potential opening—maybe a gate
that doubles as a doorway,

swinging in, swinging out to allow access.
Or perhaps build an entire wall of doors
that might open and shut at will,

each different from its neighbor,
each wearing a unique knob, some
with screens, others with a window.

Possibly add birdhouses to the doors—
perfect for miniature structures
where feathered friends might decide

to take up temporary residence, forage
for twigs in the garden, fluffing up their
own selves for nesting softness.

Let this be an opportunity to
perhaps, instead of constructing
impermeable walls, create openings,

encourage the pass-throughs
of this one and that one, leaving
entrances and exits open to all

with a bit of whimsical welcome,
a friendly invitation mixed with
great heart and a smidgen of hope.