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| THE LAWRENCE TREE by Georgia O'Keefe, 1929 |
A bird somewhere high up
In that maple tree shit on
This poem I’m writing.
▪
We don’t need to lay our theories on the world. “The world
is its own magic.” That’s what Suzuki said. A bird, for instance, somewhere
high up in that maple tree just shit on this poem I’m writing. True story. Me
and the bird, we’re together purely by accident in this brick canyon between
107th and 106th streets, New York City. It’s a beautiful
morning. A bird-shitting, poem-making morning. On the other side of the fence is
a gigantic oak tree with big fleshy leaves that flutter in the breeze eight
stories above my head. What are those stories, I wonder, not the human stories,
but the stories of the oak tree? I remember Georgia O’Keefe’s tree. The one she
painted while visiting D.H. Lawrence at his ranch in the Sierra Sangre de
Cristo above Taos. 1929. Her tree was a ponderosa pine, and beyond it was the
deep infinite ocean of the New Mexico night sky. I've sat under that tree
myself, 1996. The same tree that, in the river of itself, is a different tree
now. And like that ancient Ponderosa Pine, this oak tree next door, with its
many helter-skelter branches and leaves, perfectly expresses itself. A perfect
expression of the universe. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. And then
we take the next step outside the door where form becomes form again just as
emptiness becomes emptiness. Nothing is added, unless you count these words I write,
watching the oak tree perform its exquisitely slow dance. Summer and autumn,
winter and spring. Summer and autumn,
winter and spring. The tree will be dancing long after I am dead. Why do we
need to know? Why do we need anything else?
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