Güd wrtr

For a week now, I have risen
as the sky begins to pinken,
to gently pull aside the windowshade
and see the collective of thirteen

soaring pines downslope
standing at attention over
the Hood Canal. I look at
the half-finished upper deck

that Al is building beneath
the Council of Trees, just above
his Sub Deck, where I love to sit
and look at the trees and water

and sky, along with the occasional
submarine silently subbing its way
up the canal—ocean-bound, tower
exposed, accompanied by smaller

boats wielding wicked firepower
for protection, if necessary. Later,
sitting on the Sub Deck, I look up
and count the council members—

yes, thirteen, an excellent number.
In the event of a tie vote, one of
the council could break it, until I
remember that trees, even ones

of different species, are forever
linked underground, their rooty
fingers holding tight to each other
in a perennial pinky swear.

Which means, I suppose, that
there are no ties. That everything
between them is unanimous,
that they come to agreement

without weapons or argument
as a single body—without words,
angry or otherwise—which seems
something of a miracle,

an excellent way to operate between
conscious, caring souls, everyone
looking out for—imagine it—
everyone else.

•••

(for Al and Terri Wolf with love and thanks
for their week of hospitality in Port Ludlow, Washington)

Which seems like a lot—
the most I’ve ever had
in this lifetime—

but not nearly as many
as the longtime lodgers
perched on this hillside,

long-trunked and densely
branched evergreens that
have logged perhaps

two or three times my
number of years. No way
to know until these

great pines fall or someone
fells them, which I hope
no one does. That they,

like me, are allowed
to stand until we can’t,
that we can bask

in the view before us,
delight in it, grateful
for this time in the sun,

inhaling and exhaling
elemental molecules,
ones that we will return

to earth and air someday
when we are done
with these bodies.

But not yet,
the trees and I say.
Not yet.

When you’re a guest in someone’s
home, and they retire before you do,

and you, downstairs in the guest
room, realize that it’s dark

upstairs, and it’s midnight
and you’ve got a yen for a snack,

you decide that you’re fine—
you don’t want to wake them.

But the next day you go to
the fruit bowl in the kitchen

and fetch an especially
friendly looking peach

and bring it downstairs
with a couple of paper towels,

thinking that you’ll eat it some
late night over the bathroom sink,

letting the juice dribble down
your chin without a care

for the stickiness. Don’t wait
too long, a voice nudges

in your head. Eat that peach
while the eatin’ is good.

Don’t forego pleasure for
potential hunger later.

Take a big bite. And another.
Let that sweetness fuel your smile.

Where it has been doing its
California imitation for months,
pretending that this green place, too,
is the land of little rain.

Where the unirrigated roadside
has gone golden, like much
of my home state.

Where the climate flip-flops
like a just-landed salmon,
the migrating ones heading
upstream that bears snag
like candy out of rivers
from here to Alaska.

Where I awoke, looking
out the window to a gray veil
swaddling the canal in—can
that be?—actual rain.

All morning I watched
the curtain slowly rise to
the arrowed tops of the pines,
then higher.

Where the gray lightened into
a question of sun, though,
of course, it was up there,
making its daily arc across
the sky, the one we humans
think of as ours,

as if we’re the fixed ones
being revolved around,
as if we have the answers.

(between Kingston and Edmonds, Washington)

Today you walk on
while, underneath you,
the four- and two-wheeled ones

drive onto the thrumming deck,
but you and your friends head
up the long, elevated corridor

where dozens of passengers make
their way to long bench seats
or small tables, or to the galley

for decent coffee because this is
the Pacific Northwest, after all,
where the bad stuff is forbidden.

You take a seat with your friends
who, though recent transplants, seem
rooted here like venerable pines,

who are taking you to cruise
the abundant farmers’ market
across the water, followed

by breakfast and another ride back.
But for now you’re impersonating
a cog in one of 21 ferries that

chug across the Puget Sound
46 times a day, 322 trips a week,
through innumerable gray

mornings like this one. Like
the Harley riders on the deck
below, and the young parents

with little kids cavorting on deck,
you settle in, reflecting on the depth
and narrowness of this navigable

inlet of ocean, this estuary fed
by freshwater rivers and streams,
the creatures that make their homes

in and on and high above the water.
You, like other visitors from landlocked
locales. You who have been granted

this moment to rise from your seat,
step outside into the brisk breath
of the sea and inhale thirstily,

filling your grateful, jubilant lungs.

•••

(for Terri and Al Wolf, with my thanks for their hospitality)

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.