Planted Pines at Second Point
Eastern White Pine, Pinus strobus
Madison, Wisconsin, Summer Solstice 1971
We went out
wanting to be like Muir
find some grand holiness in Nature
and name it
We met in the dark
walked the side streets
under maples and elms
skirted the marsh,
passed the iron gate, always open
took the fork up to the grove
overlooking Lake Mendota
we each chose a pine
planted in the windbreak
when the land was still a farm
and laddered up
to where we could see the bay
still, dark
make the trees lean and swing
No great storm for us to ride
like Muir did in the Sierras
just blue jays starting their racket below us,
crows passing quietly overhead,
The sun breaking the soft-hilled horizon,
gilding the lake,
first breeze
leans us into easy rhythm
brush of needles
scent of pitch
Fifty years, still seeking,
not the door to wildness flung open
but slipped through quietly
an emptied cone beside the trail
a bright oozing scar high up the trunk
where the bark’s been chewed open by porcupine
evergreen, coniferous
needles bundled in fives
maximum height 200 feet at least
not in fifty more years or fifty more
will the white pines we climbed
match those veterans of the storied woods
who lived 450 years
those woods where
you could enter a grove at noon on a summer day
so open beneath the canopy, footsteps quieted by needle duff
where you could spread your arms and never touch two trees
where you could reach around a trunk and your fingers would never meet
the light dim as dusk
those gloried woods
the timber companies,
their Paul Bunyans,
the homesteaders who came after,
felled, cleared, burned
