Elegy for a Silk Tree

Sometimes, you stand at the long cold rectangle of your bedroom window and watch the leaves of the silk tree close slowly as night falls. You know that the opening and closing is not involuntary, that you and tree share the same sleep cycle. You can see it closing up its many hands and lying down in the dark, like an old dog.  When the tree is stranded in the rain it does the same thing, its leaves closing slowly, curling up by its own internal fire until the storm has passed. The tree’s trunk is slate, a color you’ll recognize in the sky a year later, at the beach, a day when the clouds are low, and the rain is steady. The bark is often tinged with spots of green, soft and mossy. Your fingers slide easily into the flesh, like a catcher’s mitt. The leaves of the tree are fern-like and soft. In mid-summer, the tree’s flowers bloom pink. The flowers resemble little pink pom poms, a tight cluster of stamens standing upright, at attention, around a small green center. The flowers smell good, and you fight over them with bees idling in the air, and monarch butterflies. The limbs of this tree begin nearly at ground level, as if its intention was always to be climbed. The long grey arms, bent downward, like the leaves, beckoning you up. The bottom of the tree’s bark is almost pure white as if a gallon of paint has been spilled on it. The trunk of the tree is striped vertically. You do not know why. The limbs of the tree grow at perfect intervals for a child like you to comfortably climb them. In your small side yard, they have grown horizontally, rather than vertically, and the tree is no more than six feet tall. Between the limbs the tree has small, abraded portions from which no branches grow, that look like nothing so much as Linkin Logs, latching the whole tree together. The branches split off at regular intervals, the fine notches look like knuckles, half-bent, as if forming a fist. The tree’s leaves provide dense shade in the heat of winter. In August, the tree grows green seed pods that decay or are taken off with the wind, some fall at the dry dust at the foot of the tree. You never dig at the roots of the tree though you did often in the side yard. You understand, without really knowing, that the tree and the earth hold a secret to which you are not privy, not welcomed. It is what the tree reveals to you that fascinates you, not what it hides. When you climb it, you are never scared.  The tree trunk is four hand-widths wide at its base. The bark is smooth, but it has been scored by the beak of a woodpecker that you’ve heard, but never seen. You are not sure if this is even true. Perhaps you have seen him and just forgot. It is easier to remember him in the ghostly marks he leaves, the little holes he drills searching for grubs. The tree bears these scars in silence. Your littlest finger fits perfectly into most of the holes, and you hold it there, imagining in this way, that you can hear the beating heart of the tree. In the early morning, long before you have risen from sleep, you can hear the woodpecker beating out his silent rhythm on the limbs of the tree. And you dream of men hammering on cement, and your father, putting up a picture in the living room, all alone. Sometimes, with your fingers still inside the tree you say a small prayer, something you picked up in church. You do not know the term sacrilegious. Last week, you asked your teacher, an old, white-haired woman, if trees and woodpecker’s had souls and some of the kids from higher grades laughed. You were very earnest. Your heart was beating its own insane rhythm like the woodpecker, you had to know. “Oh honey,” the teacher said, “Don’t ask silly things just to impress these boys,” nodding to the laughing kids who are not your friends. You sat down on the orange rug and watched dust motes fall in the rectangle of light. A spider in the corner spun a web in solitude.

The tree’s first limb is close enough for you to comfortably place your right foot upon it. The limb is bowed like the back of an old woman, like your grandmother, heading towards the dust. The trunk’s smoothness seems to invite you to climb more. Later in life, the sea passing through your open fingers, your open palms, will remind you of this trunk.  From there, you use your left hand to pull yourself further up into the tree, leaning your torso into the trunk’s soft embrace, and grasping, with your right hand, a limb, slightly higher. Now you pull both of your feet up onto an extrusion that must have born limbs once, but now has been worn away by the intrusions of children and bears only you. Your left hand goes blindly upward, trusting the memory of a thousand previous climbs and grabs the joint two limbs bent like an elbow. Your left-hand flexes as your left foot climbs the trunk, leaving you almost parallel, until you lift yourself neatly, both feet resting on a colossal limb that can bear your weight, in the sort of way that only a miraculous young body can do, can take for granted, as if this youth is its right, not a privilege. From here, you reach both hands up, grab a branch at shoulder height and lift yourself up to a small cranny in the tree, between limbs, where your bottom fits perfectly. You always stop here, below the crown of the tree, below its long arching branches. You think that if you climbed higher that perhaps you could reach the sky. But it is a thing that is thought of and not done. It is enough to be here, timeless, in the arms of the silk tree, held steady. The tree is a boundless thing, untethered from time. From the tree’s top, you can see the fort where you used to play with your siblings where you’d send long ropes of urine into the fronds of Juniper, the blackberry bush grown large and unruly, that sent its warm and rich fruit into your greedy hands, could see the holes where you’d dug for dinosaur bones. This was in the before time, when life didn’t revolve around DuckTales and Gummi Bears or games of Mario Brothers, warm controller passing between the hands of friends.