Thoughts on a London Plane Tree

Thoughts on a London Plane Tree

I notice it glowing from a gutter

Puddle and look up to see it

Maimed and naked, resentful

Of the tree surgeon’s pruning,

Or of that grim stave of transit,

The road.

                  But wait, the tree doesn’t resent.

It doesn’t think in blunt English, it doesn’t

Blunt think at all. If it has any tendencies,

It wields them with ardent Sloth.

But that’s no sin, a tree moving slowly.

There is no sin for a tree.

See how blunt my thinking is?

It crashes against the tree

Like a bead of rain, grasping almost

None of it.

Still, I don’t intend to give up.

Rain doesn’t give up after one drop.

I think trees must be awake

In some slow wise, must possess a gnarled sensibility.

Or at the very least, they are words spoken by the soil.

This one here is bursting with stillness.

It carves the air with numberless green-blooded swords,

Deciding to leaf or unleaf in step with the cadences

Of rainsong, the bulb flashes of day, the night’s blinks,

And the axial leanings of the great pedestal orb

In which it is plugged.

I stop to watch an invisible thought

Curling from a branch like guesswork. It might outlast me, unfurling

Arboreal inferences at the pace of an hour hand’s hour hand.

Watching a thought? I mean watching it being

Lively as a brick, livelier than a whole pile

Of bricks, and far more elegant than any built thing.

It is an ur-elegant primordial autobuilder, aesthetic ancestor

Whose swoops and jaggednesses are the original

Effortless style – but, unlike any human arrangement,

Actually effortless.

                                   Not that trees don’t labour:

They grow, stand fast, and tote the sky,

They hold off the rain, point out the stars, and guard the world

As seed-sprinkled sentinels dotted across the earth. They labour,

But they do not design themselves. Their shapeliness

Is our construction – though one may hang over a mirror

Pond for centuries, apparently dangling lovingly

Towards itself.

                            I dangle towards trees, lovingly.

My words are small and fleeting,

They land for a moment

On a branch and then are gone.