I Think That I Shall Never See

A poem as lovely as a tree….I’m always fascinated by words, how a word, even one we think everyone will understand in the same way, in a different person will recall a certain image unfamiliar to you. I grew up near the beach, for example. For me, a tree means a palm tree or a coconut tree. Not a ponderosa pine.

But this is really not a post about trees or beaches; it’s really about writing prompts. On Thursdays when we offer our support group for writers, we often include a writing prompt. The thing I like about the prompts is that there really are no expectations. It’s about greasing the wheels of creativity, playing with words, having fun. There is no expectation that you will finish the 7-minute prompt with a completed story or poem. To be honest, I feel lucky if I get an idea or a half completed sentence. And always get good writing.

I like to share a line of poetry as a prompt, or an excerpt from a book. In this case I read aloud from Ariel Gore’s recent book, Hexing the Patriarchy where I found this “spell.” I like thinking of this as a prompt or a meditation (perhaps because meditation is a new tool I’ve discovered recently). I think some magic happened…

Some of our Plumesters shared their writing for me to post (and if I missed your email, let me know and we’ll do a Part 2).

Sandra Vallie

There was a fir tree in a pocket park I’d visit on walks with Cujo, the Rottweiler my husband had wanted to name Samantha Goodpuppy for her temperament. We named her what our son, adolescent and drifting away, wanted, hoping to give him some being in the house to be close to. Cujo and I always said hello to the fir, and if it wasn’t yet dark, we’d spend a few minutes listening to what the fir said. I don’t recall it was anything particular, yet I always felt the tree, how present it was, how peaceful, rooted and connected to all that lives and moves and speaks under the fallen branches, rising fungus and drifts of leaves we see, the things that hide the under ground until we stop to listen. 

One walk, Cujo led me to the tree and laid down. Wouldn’t move. I lowered myself – with nothing near Cujo’s ease and grace – onto a high-sitting fallen tree. Sat, listened, and heard my dead father’s voice telling me to call my mother. Not one to ignore dead people, no matter how much I might have disregarded my father when he was alive, I called mom, 12 hundred miles away in Florida. She answered, but her speech was slurred, she didn’t know what day it was. Every couple of minutes, delighted and amazed, she thanked me for calling. Asked me how we all were. Over all those miles and cell phone towers, I decided she was having a stroke.

It didn’t really matter what I named it – mom was in trouble. I started to make phone calls to people who were closer to her. Even when I left out the part about my dead father’s voice, it was hard to get people to believe something was going on: “she’s just tired, it’s late, did you ask her if she’s had dinner” and “I just talked with her this morning and she was fine”. I finally connected with my cousin and she drove the quarter mile to mom’s house and, once inside, called an ambulance.

My mother made it through the episode, although for years she insisted it hadn’t been a stroke but an allergic reaction to Greek yogurt. It was also the beginning of a series of health problems that lasted for years and ended with mom dying after months on a respirator, confined to bed in a Tennessee nursing home, convinced until the end she could will herself to walk out of there. I haven’t heard from my father again – not surprising – or my mother, although my grandmother dropped a cherry Hall’s lozenge in front of me one day. I held Cujo in my arms as she died after her stomach ruptured. I walked near the fir with Rufus, the dog who came to us a couple of years after Cujo died, but we didn’t stop – by then I was trying hard to get away from that midwestern town. I wasn’t stopping anywhere.

Six years after we got where I was going, my husband died. Since then, I’ve had a number of painful losses and a fair amount of joy. I talk with trees again and recently planted five behind my house. Those I beg to survive as I pour gallons of water on them in the middle of a months-long desert heat wave and drought. I spend the most time with the stump, half as tall as me, of a mulberry I had taken down in late winter. A metal Rottweiler holding a tennis ball lazes atop the stump, next to a bonsai tree made from a thick, twisted grape vine and tinsel. There’s too-ripe fruit, fallen sunflower heads and the birds who land to eat both. I feel the mulberry canopy above me even as I look at the logs cut from its branches a few feet away. The mulberry roots run through the yard, and a fungus that infected the tree is in the soil, in the under ground, where I can’t see it. I know it’s there, without even seeing the browned and crisped leaves it left behind on the raspberries I planted too close to the mulberry roots. It is the way of trees and what they hold in their roots, what lives in the under ground, the fallen branches, rising fungus, the drifts of leaves I stand and listen for.  

Jen Lucero

“What kind of tree is this?” I asked.

“It’s a willow tree,” Mom told me. We had walked behind our apartment.

The willow tree swept over our heads like a broom, it’s long wavy branches brushed against our faces and tickled my nose. I had seen trees before but not this type of tree. It provided a cool spot for sitting as Mom and happily lounged beneath the swaying shrubs. Mom was quiet as usual as I explored the tree’s intricate body. How could this tree look so different than any tree I’ve seen before? Sunlight could not penetrate swinging slender branches. I noticed oozing sap from the trunk of the tree and stuck my finger close to it- it was slightly like water but it stuck to my finger. Mom watched me carefully and stepped over the large roots to see what I had found. She had her camera with her and pointed the lens at me. I smiled. This went down in our history with our Willows. “These willows live a long time.” She told me confidently and hugged me

Chrystal O’Keefe

“The owls are not what they seem but you can trust the trees” I jokingly said to Sherri as we reached the forbidden campus grounds. She asked where I heard that from and was disappointed when I said the first part was from Twin Peaks and the other half was a made up musing from my own sarcastic humor. 

We often snuck out after her mom fell asleep and squeezed through the small hole in the gate. Our skinny teenage bodies made it easy. Central State seemed like the perfect spooky place to conjure up some spirits and practice witchcraft. A craft we mostly learned from The Craft and whatever library books we could sneak while we waited for her mom at the library.

As we walked down the dark abandoned campus, we both felt an intense connection to the tree guarding the tunnel entrance. Did someone plant it to keep pesky teens out of the tunnels? 

We gently unfolded our blanket and set our makeshift altar. I lit the white candle with the lighter I stole from the gas station for the cigarettes I pretended to smoke. Suddenly, a large gust of wind came out of nowhere, violently shaking branches and blew out our candle. Did we anger the Gods? The deities? Or even worse, mother nature?

Jennifer Simpson

I keep forgetting about my tree. I don’t even know it’s name–that is to say what kind of tree it is. A neighbor convinced me to sign up to get the tree through a city program giving away free trees. I wish I felt connected to it. I forget to water it and I see the leaves beginning to whither in the 100 degree Albuquerque heat and I feel guilty. It is a kind of elm, but not the invasive ones that were planted around town by some previous mayor. Those are Siberian Elms. They don’t belong here and they’ve been outlawed though you wouldn’t know it; they sprout from cracks in the concrete every spring. They are invasive.

This land has never felt like my land. Neither the high desert with its dry blue sky with puffy white clouds nor the mountain meadows with purple lilies surrounded by ponderosa pines that people swear smell like vanilla….

I hope you all are writing. And finding the time to breathe and inhale trees and exhales poems and prose. I need these sessions like I need breath. Thank you to those of you who come to our Thursday Support Group for Women and Women-identifying writers, and my Monday Writers and Wednesday Brown Bag Writers. If you’re not writing with me, I hope you’re writing somewhere, in community. (email me at jennifer {at} plumeforwriters.org and I’ll email more details about the meetings and the zoom links.