A Copper Beech

1. Let my weakness nonetheless speak some of the names of grief for you, which must sound to you like the cricket song sounds to us, poignant in dazzling ephemerality. 
2. And so, with the limited powers at my command, I imagine all the ages of you flickering into being at once, as from some battery-powered flashlight purchased at the hardware store down Warwick Ave., the light browning out as it goes. 
3. Or: like light through the somber burgundy canopy of April, at dusk, the smell of the ocean easterly, the light across the crushed rock in the backyard, the buoying up the weeds. 
4. All the ages to you are instants, are the one age unfolding, performing the drama of time.
5. You exceed all interpretations of you. 
6. When Plato argued (in “Timaeus”) that trees were not capable of self-locomotion, he was catastrophically wrong. (“Wherefore it lives indeed and is not other than a living creature, but it remains stationary and rooted down owing to its being deprived of the power of self-improvement.")
7. The root ball under my backyard attests to your capacity for self-locomotion. Down there all is longing and reaching out and grasping.
8. And: in the wind you cavort and lament and wave and whisper in that joy of natural motion, in that condition of change that is this world and above. Still and not still, subject to change, and changing others in turn, immemorial and instantaneous.
9. Four or five hurricanes or tropical storms barnstorming up the coast we fretted over you, imaging dark futures, only to see you instead now in your final struggle with a nematode? If we saw five such storms, you have seen how many? Two hundred and fifty?
10. We worked hard at learning to say your name in Japanese, even though you come from Europe: ぶなの木. Because as we learning about your illness we were learning Japanese, where the trees have immemorial poems written about them. 
11. Basho says: 木を切りて本口見るや今日の月 (ki o kirite/motokuchi miru ya/kyō no tsuki). I caused a tree to fall, and when I looked in my yard at its fallenness, I saw today’s moon.
12. Some possible origins for the European beech trees of New England: Falmouth, England, 50.1526° N, 5.0663° W; Plymouth, England, 50.3755° N, 4.1427° W; Gravesend, England, 51.4419° N, 0.3708° E; London, England, 51.5072° N, 0.1276° W; Cowes, England, 50.7628° N, 1.3005° W; Weymouth, England, 50.6099° N, 2.4546° W; Amsterdam, Netherlands, 52.3676° N, 4.9041° E; etc.
13. At first your end will be a striping, as with certain military decorations, for a having-lived, a having-seen, for a having-been here with the humans. Like all scarifications, at first a sign of strength, a kind of character. And only later the stripes will be a thing the grieving parties will discuss.
14. The woodpecker that took possession of that one scoured-out spot on your front produced such an outpouring of wood dust when last we were there. Was it taking advantage of a weakness, a future it somehow knew was to come? Is the woodpecker the sign of the transition into the next stage?
15. The mast season is the time when you dropped all your barbed casings, and within these, all the beech seeds. Some years were more torrential than others. It took about three years to understand in full. I loved the years of overflowing fertility, and the sound of seed casings percussing on the deck.
16. A neighbor said the year before her tree died there was a voluminous last year of seed pods, and then nothing.
17. We hatched about a hundred saplings one year, dug our own sand and soil, and then somehow a mouse, or some other forager, some pest, got in there, where we had lined up these saplings, in paper cups, and killed half of them. The saplings must taste good. "(Apparently the Neanderthals ate them, after toasting.)"
18. Some two or three saplings, of those we hatched, survived into the second year. Both times, in August, there was a big die off, and striping, when all we wanted to do was to preserve this bit of you. To carry the message of the copper beech, as the early interlopers, tree enthusiasts brought you forth from the old countries. 
19. All we wanted to do was to plant a few more of you the Northeast, like Johnny Appleseed did with his tree of choice. 
20. Let the copper of the copper beech be no longer a color of Europe but a color for everyone, everywhere.
21. “Nematode” is such a good word, so alien and luminous and strange, at least, until you are confronted with its power. The word “nematode” is longer than a nematode is. 
22. “Entirely itself,” Marie Howe says of the copper beech in her poem, before attempting to climb it. No description could be more exact. 
23. Who transports hence the nematodes? The woodpecker, the blue jay, the squirrel, the kid in the backyard attempting to climb the beech tree, the action figures—Marvel, etc.—that we used to lodge in your branches? During the pandemic we (summarily) hanged many action figures in the crook of you.
24. All that is small, crabbed, fearful, insular about Rhode Island is flushed away in the grandeur of the beech trees dotting its municipalities. In the sun they reach out across the limitations, surviving even the initials carved into them, in, e.g., India Point Park.
25. A grief for you is a not-living-in-the-present, a celebration of your life is a not-living-in-the-present, but it is to be subject to time, under your diminished canopy. 
26. You know nothing about the colonies, and the colonial will-to-power, only that the sun and the sandy ground here suit you. The colonies, the states, the political parties, the recessions and depressions, the rising and falling, the closing down of empire, the rise and fall of the Europeans, all like cricket song.
27. “First page/of literature/in Sanskrit/on beech/the runic tablets/on beech,” says C. D. Wright in her book on the subject, and, later, “The nuts are a touch toxic, yet edible.”
28. When God wants to instruct a child in eternity, God makes first a flash card with the image of a beech. 
29. In May, it’s like you’re on fire, with the purple of your early leaves almost a laughable conflagration, an advertisement for fecundity. Let May come around again. Let May be the beginning of your performative year, even if it’s your last. 
30. These lines indicating that we will not forget.