Two Poems

Robin Chapman

 

IN THE FOREST, THE TREES FALL
for D. Leighton

I look down a ravine of fallen lodge pole trunks,
the snow striped white on their backs, bridges
of light, and the standing trees of pine and spruce
filter green light ricocheting down the valley—
so much promise in the midst of warming days,
this dying off in the pine beetle’s fungal blight—
so many places to cross, or hide, or rest,
if one is a mouse, or a red squirrel, or a pine
marten hunting voles, or a vole oneself.
And the light—the yellow-green light—belongs
to Emily Carr. Easy to feel young here,
in the forest, where I’m younger than most
of the trees—and to accept that there are uses
in aging, even falling and decay, as the mosses
find purchase, the lichens spread. I think
of you, and Peggy, who envisioned this space
of artist’s huts, dreamed them real—their history
still part of you, though the present moments
may fall like rain through a sieve—brief
registry! Here are your bridges to the duff,
sun-splotched, here is my letter of gratitude
for this artist’s space in the forest to work—
sunlight through pines and spruce.

                                         ◊

TEN TALL PINES

stand stripped of needles
before my window, waving
with the wind, dying now
from pine-bark beetle larva
and the fungus it admits—

though I see, at the very
top of each, some of the last
pine cones they will make,
poised now to seed
lodge poles of a new century.

Some even argue it’s what
we need, to thin the stands
for a warmer century. Others
see the chance to log
more trees in perpetuity.

I meet a woman
raising a nursery of pines
and spruce to reforest
the clear-cut land
under the power lines.

                                                  ◊

And I wonder if the fire
that will sweep through
will be the swift or the slow—
flames, or the fall and rot
of trunks into new soil.