Medicine
by Loralee Clark

If there is enough bark left,
if its trunk lying nearby
or if you were the one to fell it
you might be able to tell a tree’s identity
once it has been sawn to a stump.
Mina was not.

She recalled reading the reasons
for learning about trees vary from purely recreational
to the strictly serious. *
In this moment Mina realized she was serious
and pushed her nose onto the cut wood:
not pine. Or cedar.
Its neighbors were oak, tulip poplar, maple;
surely the stump was most likely one of its kin
but she had the distinct impression
without wood chips or sawdust nearby
the stump had simply sprouted from the molded forest floor
as a spontaneous fungal decision.

She studied the tree’s fingerprint, wide and circular,
deciding it should be in her notebook.
Fingers that had drawn themselves over ferns’ fronds,
that had combed and plaited long grasses
rummaged to find supplies and soon drew a sticky brush,
the largest she could find in the garage,
across the stump, plying drying paint and spit.

Opening the notebook to clean, white pages
she pushes it onto the stump and sits atop it for a while,
the birds and squirrels coming closer as Mina’s movement
slows, as her own feathers ruffle slightly in the wind.
She paints and prints four more times: tan, blue, grey and red
the only colors available, though pinks, oranges and yellows
are her preference.

The rest of the week she sits outside against the stump
counting the fingerprint’s rings in her book to see
how old the tree was, if
there was a tree at all.
Mina colors every other ring with scratchy pencil scribbling,
the print hypnotizing, intermittently labelling
from the center outward:
I might have been a sapling
I saw Mina cutting my aunt’s bark this year
I keep a nest for robins now
A fox sniffs under my skirts
Mina flies above the spruce
A squirrel made her home in my arms this year.

On another page, after the prints, she writes
a dizzying spiral story about being lost at sea,
curled into a jar, locked in a chest
on a ship that sunk, made from the heart
of the stump’s tree.

Mina already knows the moss and lichen,
the sandy dirt will eventually cover the stump and reshape it,
the same way she will forget the shape of her own face
as she ages, telling her stories to stones.

* excerpt from Peterson’s First Guides: Trees

~

Loralee Clark is a writer who grew up learning a love for nature and her place in it, in Maine. She resides in Virginia now as a writer and artist. Her Instagram is @make13experiment. She has a book forthcoming, “Solemnity Rites”, with Prolific Pulse Press LLC and has been published most recently in Nebo, One Art, Choeofpleirn Press, Wingless Dreamer, Washington Writer’s Publishing House, Heart on Our Sleeves, The Taborian, Superpresent, Thimble Literary Magazine, Impossible Task, Studio One, Cannon’s Mouth, and Big Windows Review.

Featured image: Photo by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird, 2018, via Unsplash.