Releasing a Tree, and: Exposures, and: In Praise of Lichens

Releasing a Tree

Softly pummeled overnight, the lower limbs of our Norway spruce flexed and the deepening snow held them. Windless sunlight now, so I go out wearing hip waders and carrying not a fly rod but a garden hoe. I begin worrying the snow for the holdfast of a branch that’s so far down a wren’s nest floats above it like a buoy. I work the hoe, not chopping but cradling, then pull straight up. A current of air as the needles loft their burden over my head. Those grace notes of the snowfall, crystals giving off copper, green, rose—watching them I stumble over a branch, go down and my gloves fill with snow. Ah, I find my father here: I remember as a child how flames touched my hand the time I added wood to the stove in our ice-fishing shanty, how he plunged that hand through the hole into the river, teaching me one kind of burning can ease another. The branch bobs then tapers into place and composes itself, looking unchanged though all summer it will bring up this day from underfoot.

Exposures

Often for Mathew Brady, lying ill and sleepless on his pauper’s cot, it’s 1862 again and New Yorkers by the thousands are attending his gallery exhibit The Dead of Antietam. Many weep, giving names to the fallen. The fingers of the dead are swollen, arched and spread like those of pianists: God’s music, he believes. He hears a man saying to himself, “For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.” Some ask if these scraps of paper around their sons could be letters home. Did he collect any before the wind could carry them away?

After the war the nation tried to heal itself by forgetting Brady’s work. Creditors seized his darkroom wagons, cameras, and glass negatives, ten thousand exposures taken by the dozen assistants he directed like a general from First Manassas to Petersburg. Who knows me now, thirty years after Appomattox? he asks himself, unable any longer to feel bitterness.

His wife Juliette so loved the calla lily, its cuplike swirl of white inflorescence, that every year on the anniversary of her death he has come to this same Manhattan greenhouse and carried one home in its clay pot to set beside their bed. But now the single flower will rest on his nightstand in a charity ward.

A man carries a square of glass from a barrel to the wall of the greenhouse where yesterday’s hailstorm shattered panes. What he sets in place is a photographer’s glass negative. Closer, and Mathew Brady sees it’s May 4, 1864, the day before the Battle of the Wilderness. A group of the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry is playing cards, writing letters, smoking clay pipes.

All but one young volunteer stay motionless for the thirty seconds of exposure. A pipe smoker, his smile almost a smirk, he exhales in puffs like smoke signals that in the developing solution become a blur, the negative’s shadow pouring from his mouth—as though, Brady remembers thinking, I’ve captured an exorcism.

On an assault field you’re hurled from one thought to another quick as a musket ball can ricochet, the pipe smoker told him before the battle. Ah, his name was William, Brady remembers. Then you’re on your belly, time and motion stop and you’re studying a fossil tossed up by the shell that might have killed you. The workman reaches into his barrel.

Bearing a calla lily, Mathew Brady passes through light streaming through the dead in the thickets of the Wilderness. Is William there? he wonders. All those years of working in darkness could have come to worse, it strikes this dying man so he almost laughs aloud, than to be found in a greenhouse gallery, which is no house divided against itself. Here Federals and Confederates alike are called upon to force the flowers.

In Praise of Lichens

We’re out walking a path in silence, carefully looking away from each other and into the trees, having just broken off an argument before one of us could say something

that couldn’t be turned back from. You stop, then I follow you to an oak it must have taken lightning to split down the middle like that, the halves falling away from each other.

Now the sapwood and heartwood are a common for lichens, these pioneer plants that do not flower. On the light air currents we make as we look closely, spores rise

to further colonize the forest. Here’s a lichen that reminds me of my grandpa’s beard, tobacco stained, and then another that with its intersecting lines and blank spaces

looks like a map. We’re right . . . here. Warming to our game, you counter with what could be the open mouth of a baby bird, and flaring near it an orange corona

you dub TJ2011 in Andromeda, the newest supernova in that galaxy. It’s time to go back, but look: in shadow among the flourishers here’s something we nearly missed.

Let the end of all fallen trees be our bending together like this over a lichen it takes both of us to read. I see it as an alien craft’s dish antenna

locked on Mars in ’50s sci-fi. Yes, and you add how those beings attacked by fighter planes and tanks only wanted to teach us earthlings how to love one another.