Nude Descending an Empire

Douglas Fir

48 Douglas Fir This tree has stood here in this one spot, growing a few inches each year while men have waged wars and cheated on wives, built ships, crossed oceans with guns and horses and slaves; while they have written down book after book describing the world, proposing religious principles, and scientific theories, while they have explained the grass, the river, the soul; while they have mapped lands as yet unknown to them, while they have gone out every day into the fields, while they have died inside coal mines, built cities from the ruins of forests, while they have swept across continents with the steel will of God, 49 this tree has stood here simply rising, finding all it needed in the one spot where it was born, sixty yards from the braided flash of water called Rock Creek now in a language no one here spoke when the tree was young. It has lived in the nameless sound of water pouring through water night after night for six hundred years, while Cortez deceived the Aztecs, while Narvaez fed the mothers of chiefs to his dogs, while boats carried off ten million African men and women, while the sugarcane rose overnight, was gleaned, appeared on finely set tables in Amsterdam and London, as fine, white powder as pure as snow, 50 while a blacksmith smelted ore into oarlocks and chains, while they rusted between voyages, between storms, while Jefferson wrote all men, while he wrote equal, this tree stood here simply rising, its branches holding the turning night of stars and the darkness turning into dawn, day into night, night into day, each like a breath, exhaling the summer grasses, inhaling the moonlit snow. While men have turned on their lights, one by one, at first with awe, then in sleep—as they have turned on their radios, their phones, their washing machines, their televisions, as they have lived inside their lights, their images, their sound. 51 As they have built roads through the pores of the dusk, as corporations bought up the dust of the land, this tree has stood here in the felt music of the earth giving its neck and eyes to the mist. While heretics burned, while women burned, while black churches and black men on crosses burned, while the fruit trees of the Navajos burned, while the fields burned, always the same jeweled tongues leaping from the fire, roiling through the human heart, while the World Trade Center burned the tallest flame, while the skin of Hiroshima burned, while men, burning, hovered before the burning TV watching the burning, this tree has stood here 52 in this one spot, simply rising each spring another ring, buried so deep now you could never find it, deep as the owl that called on those nights, deep as the snow that fell into its arms, leaving the ground below bare and dusted, as all around the elk passed sinking up to their ribbed hulls. It has turned the snow into a sky of leaves, the sun into bulbous muscle while the deer stepped out of the willows at dusk, while beavers dragged branches of felled aspen across the grass, while people who have now vanished camped nearby among the vanished cries of the wolf, it grew, 53 while fires no one recorded skirted its bark in flames, while lightning cleft its trunk, it grew, and the grasses spilled their generations of seed, and the hawks circled. It has stood here rising for six hundred years and it is here now in your life, as you rise, watching, as you watch, the sky shade magenta, flash mauve, you can go touch it, you can sit beneath it, stand together in the same sky remembering whatever you remember from your days on earth, you can ask yourself what would it be for a person to rise up like that, you can wait for an answer, as all around you everything happens. ...