American linden also American lime of the family Basswood (tiliaceae un- pronounceable virtually for this layman) but mine opposite keeps that quiet and presents facts as they appear – being a handsome street-shade tree with elephant bark in hard scaly ridges and russet twigs wandering into green until, when flowering, it fills with bees giving a murmurous but once heard un- ignorable oozing Spring song to show the tree knew what its name was all along. * This morning everything I need to know the tree can tell me. Its stillness is perfect stillness. Its movement when wind blows is the dance of a soul before God. Think what a story I would miss if ever I looked away. The text of beauty. A late chance gone of boring a hole in my own skull and seeing what I imagine next. * Delicate still in its breezy morning the tree I now want to know as ‘her’ with those fine swizzle-stick twitches. She is playing the part of Summer, flouncing her feathery evening boa and catching the eye of her paramour: me, in the frame of my window, watching to see if a rival appears in the black silk net of her shadow. * Loving a thing I know is when a becomes the. The tree in view I know is what I love to see. * One night and then for a week after a large green heron with no idea of the right and wrong place to live takes up residence in her branches. Only occasional eyes passing below look up and notice; mostly they see a heavy white shit-trail and assume that fell by magic out of nowhere. Eventually I realize my duty here is to grasp things as they appear, and see the puzzle is not what goes where, the problem is one of scale. * Wearing a bright orange hi-viz jacket the leaf-blower dismisses fallen leaves from left to right along the sidewalk, while the wind with no color or form orders them back in the other direction to settle beneath the tree once more. * I know this view of falling leaves, this pane of glass I wonder through in my nice house is what must pass for all there is. But time reserved, the sweeping up or under carpets — what of that? Today, e.g., while these last leaves release their tree I know in fact you’re off to town (the rarity! — so much denied) for nothing much except to stretch your sense of days from what it is to what it was or seemed to be, and if our luck had turned a jot I soon enough might then expect to hear your key scrape in the lock of life with me. But as it is I only see. * First thing and last thing this fickle time of year a skein of Canada geese fly over my roof and the tree squeezing their rubber horns. It is what I expect to hear but the tree look up amazed, her dark fountain frozen. So much extravagant move- ment and all of it chosen! In the aftermath a breeze kicks off a different scene, but the most branches do is to stir very heavily, as a spar of flotsam will in the weak hands of the sea. * Like my love when she takes off her ring and lays it on the nightstand beside our bed, the tree places her last leaf on the sidewalk and stands completely naked wanting to play. * As the tree opens her long arms like a sinner appealing to heaven or a past master of levitation I hesitate to mention a starling given the variety of ways to look but clearly a starling settles in. The bird looks at the leaves left: four a sensible pumpkin brown the fifth still alarmingly green. Order now depends on relation: my love of course at the center and the leaves her small crown. What can the starling choose but to flitter away. So he angles his head to one side. Then does. * This late in Autumn she wears a contraption made of gold leaf, but even such glamour is never enough to keep her from harm. The faintest breath of disheveling air and she’s poor again, a shivering waif whose one ambition remains to be warm. * In one bad idea a buzz-saw rips in Domino Sugars across the harbor: surely the sound of a sugar tree sliced into saleable logs — there is that panic and saccharine crash. But this is a thought I keep to myself and the tree never has. * I plunge my hand inside the tree and neighbors think I’m a conjuror about to snatch a dove from a hat. It’s not like that. I’m testing heat and degrees of dark to see if they match the kind of box I have in mind. * In the absence of straight lines the story goes round and round, which brings comfort of a sort. Be patient is the best advice, which I must say is not enough but these days has to suffice. * Linden tree, linden tree when the bulk of Europe lay to rest in your shade and one traveler’s hat blew from the traveler’s head as he continued on his way, now tell me what I can see apart from the patch of shade where a pillow of brittle leaves show in its vacancy how my own head might lie, linden tree, linden tree. * Millions of years pass: the sun drowns in ash, sap sinks underground, and the tree is empty – a remainder of itself but absent from itself. Then the glaciers return, the heavens open again, and creatures multiply. The tree is ready for this. Like a factory at dawn its stiff machinery whirrs and a faint tremor passes throughout the entire plant as the crowned head bows down to accept the weight of a full-throated blackbird, the
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