~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Bob Perkins

“The Adaptive Geometry of Trees”*

Winter trees stand more than naked, like x-rays of themselves.

Oak, larch, ash, elm, each discloses

its species’ shape and secrets: the branches’ large geometry

learned from tiny tutors, the algorithms of DNA.

Glance, and you might think their shapes mechanical,

new, small branches repeating a mantra begun at trunk,

but that is not quite right. See how the upper twigs grow closer:

more numbers, less bulk. They are to carry leaves, not limbs;

they take shapes proper to their stations.

Yes, it’s done with mere hormones, cytokinins regulating growth.

Yes, it’s chemistry, not magic, I agree, but look

at their individuality, no birch like another,

each shape expressing a single soul, yes, it's DNA, but more –

experience, accidents of beetles, ice storms, wet years, shady neighbors,

and how it coped, a function integrated over time.

How brave of them to stand there so exposed!

Do you object, “They have no eyes”? “They do not know they are bare”?

Remember summer, how every leaf turned

to catch the sun. We can call it phototropism, but they see.

Remember how they surged to capture sweetness while the days were long.

We can call it metabolism, but they know.

They move. They bleed. They die. They see. They know.

And they stand each winter where we, if we had eyes,

might read each tree’s x-ray, its autobiography.

I think each could be a different epic poem, but every one might start

“I have lived here many years. I have done my best. This is what I have become.”

*The Adaptive Geometry of Trees is a 1971 book by ecologist and evolutionary biologist Henry S. Horn which attempts to explain branch and leaf patterns as strategies to capture sunlight, and further to explain how bare land becomes climax forest by observing the interactions between those strategies.  It is persuasive and poetic. If this footnote gets someone to read it I’ll feel ok about stealing its title.

Or waves. Or chickens.

My Aunt Marie was poor. She lived beside

a stinking chicken ranch, a dry flatland

where smog hid any mountains. Her sky

was ochre, but, well, she grew hollyhocks.

I live in a rich man’s house with a rich man’s view

of bright blue sky, dark blue ocean

breaking at my feet, penitent and grand.

When I visited Marie, we visited her hollyhocks,

a narrow row her house shielded from the wind,

up against the chain-link fence,

next to those caged, complaining hens.

I’d pet the dogs she had taken in, drink her buttermilk,

and those scarlet and white ruffled hollyhocks shone

as gloriously as this million-dollar view.

Our visits were short and rare.

I had things to do, money to make,

but Marie planted seeds, watched them

break the ground, watered, weeded while they shot

sunward, bloomed, wilted. She harvested

their seeds. When the Santa Anas blew

down the stalks she started over.

Her hollyhocks made a story and a life

sadder and more joyous than I could see.

Maybe we are the dogs, or maybe the hollyhocks

of an impoverished God who cannot afford

a universe overlooking the endless sea.

I imagine he, she, it just tends the hollyhocks

and does the best they can.

Take my life. Please.

When they told Sisyphus he would push that rock forever

he knew he had them beat. He didn’t blame them

for believing in forever. Or even, much,

for trying to inflict it on him. Gods are only human.

Which would wear out first? The rock? The mountain? The metaphor?

The important thing, he thought,

was a sense of humor,

what some call deceit.

That, and remembering to dodge when it all rolls downhill.

Remembering and thinking,

any prisoner’s comfort, everyone’s punishment.

Sisyphus tried an exercise:

Compare and contrast remembering and thinking

with kingdoms and nymphs

but somehow he never finished it, what with

thinking about the nymphs and remembering the kingdoms

and contemplating his crime, whatchacallit — hubris?

Believing you could trick gods?

“Guilty,” he laughed, thinking

you have to be smarter than the tool you’re working with,

never easy for a fictional character.

“Hey,” Sisyphus asked the rock. “Is it quitting time yet?”

Bob Perkins is not famous, and though born in the South, lives in California. He's no longer a boxboy, submariner, odd-job man, typist, lawyer, or teacher. He does read and write poetry with the Manhattan Beach Senior Poetry Circle, and has published a few poems in the Los Angeles Review, Shot Glass, Bellowing Ark, and elsewhere. Email: murphyperkins@gmail.com