Blog #8: The tree across from my stoop

Outside the front door of my apartment building, one that creaks as it shuts and bands loudly against its frame, there is a concrete stoop that I have spent a great deal of time on since moving into my apartment this past August.  It's a small square of concrete, maybe 6x6 feet, with two steps leading down to walkway that then leads the sidewalk.  A small lawn of grass frames the walkway on either side, and two large bushes, dead now in the cold air, browned and brittle, but soon to be greening and budding in the new season, frame the stairs. At the end of Summer and into Autumn, I sat on the right side of the stoop in the balmy night air, watching the people pass, doing a great deal of poetry writing. Something about these concrete stairs, this little patch of grass beneath them that I could rest my bare feet on, the street ahead, lamp posts and headlights, sounds of grocery carts from the Market District next door, welcomed me and stimulated my creative mind.  As Winter came and brought colder nights, I've still spent time on the stoop but in shorter spans of time and less opportunity to ponder.

Still, when I walk in or out of that door at night, there is something that I always look at for a few seconds, or longer if I sit.  Across the street from my stoop, growing up just beside a tall lamp post and right out of the concrete, is my tree.  Something about this particular tree has always called my attention and my focus.  Its trunk leans slightly to the right, seemingly imbalanced, but its strong roots push into the ground and hold it steady.  Beneath the lamp light, the leaves in the fall made shades of color that I found it difficult to describe in my poems and even more difficult to turn away from.  The leaves were greens and yellows, little tapered diamond points at one end and curved half circles on the other.  I can see them vividly, their particular hue, their clustered groups on the ends of branches.  When Winter came, the bones of its branches rose gracefully out of its base and seemed to wind around the light, seemed to catch glints of silver moon and yellow street light in its fingers and hold them still for me.

I'll included a poem that's come out of my muse, to give an idea of the captivating nature it has on me, on this constant pull I feel it wrapping me with. Some of it ended up leaking into a couple other poems so it's split off to become pieces of others, but it originated from this tree. I could see it being the inspiration for a woman character in a story, but in a way I think I connect with it too deeply to make it anyone other than myself. With this idea, I changed the subject of the poem from 'the oak' (I'm not even positive it's an oak, I should find this out) to her, to see what it would do if posed as a woman.

She makes her own silhouettes

of rash and many branches,

                        stable and frenzied.

She grows her leaves of

            coppered green metal

            like mold on yellowed bread crust

                        while tendrils and filament spider inside. 

 She loves them hard,   

only to let them go  

when they’ve paled their color.

She reaches her fingers through the silvered smog

grasps at the moonlight 

pulls it into her like a breath.

She rebels against the air,

seizes a new space to stab with branches,

             shudders into a gasp of buds and knobs,

                        breathless, bare.

Textured veins creep up her side

            where the trunk split out of the ground

her legs splayed in rooted grace,

where she leans against her weight

           

            a coat of knuckled surface around her rawness

                                    so stacatto, so gristled

is the bark.

Blog #7

I had some guests with me on my most recent pond visit who go by the names of Oscar and Simon.  They're two wonderful, imaginative boys that I nanny in Pittsburgh and on a day off of school, we went to the Schenley pond for a picnic. While walking down the pathway, I shared with them some of the thoughts that I have had on previous blog expeditions about this area of the park.  We talked about vining plants, about how I almost fell through the ice in the section at a clearing (naturally they started to run for that clearing and I had to pull them back fast), I told them about some of the plants I had learned were around us and about the large tree fallen during the wind storm. As soon as we came across the remains of the great trunk, we went for a climbing expedition.  Simon was first to clamber up the large, leaning trunk that started down in a bit of a mucky area and rose up against a hill. Oscar followed but then ran back to grab my phone and take a picture at the exposed area of the tree- the same thing that interested me when I first found it.  Simon climbed a little too far and became too scared to come back, so I went up to steady him and we slid down the trunk slowly together.

When we got to the big bean of Schenley pond we saw that the ducks were back.  I don't know that I've ever had enough interaction with a specific small body of water to see ducks there in one season, gone in the next, and then to also be there for when they return.  There was no pond or river around me growing up that I had that sort of relationship to, so I have never before experienced the kinship you can feel with a flock of birds that you feel like you know.  The same sort of warm surge of affection felt when seeing a family member or friend after awhile swelled in my chest. They're back! The ducks! My duck friends are back, woo hoo! We fed them crusts of our sandwiches, aiming as best we could at each one to make sure we rationed their morsels evenly among them.

In addition to the ducks there, about six geese were lurking at the other end of the pond. I say lurking because, although I find geese to be majestic and beautiful in their breadth and coloring, the artful S of their neck like a swan but with a different kind of elegance, I'm a little wary.  When I was growing up, my dad came home from the golf course one day after having been bitten by a goose and it's stuck in my mind that they can be aggressive when provoked.  I imagine this is true with most animals, and geese on a golf course are certainly encountering a different provocation than those at the pond, but still, I was wary being with the kids.  They saw us feeding the ducks and pushed their way over in the water faster than I anticipated until suddenly they were right up front.  I had Oscar and Simon stop feeding the birds for a little while, but the geese were smart; they knew what we had in our paper bags. One brave bird stretched his neck far over to my feet and began pecking around them until I moved up on the steps at the edge of the pond.  This goose was not backing down, though, and began to slowly waddle, webbed foot by webbed foot, up the pond steps.  Crumbling what was left of my sandwich, I threw the pieces out far into the pond and had the kids walk around the edge to a new section to avoid any two bump geese bites and tears.

While the kids were walking away and I was packing up the lunches, a really marvelous thing happened. In the span of just a couple seconds, Oscar and Simon came around from behind the marshy cat tail growth in the crook of one side of the pond...with a hawk following them.  I wasn't quick enough with my camera to capture it, but this beautiful, tawny and caramel colored red-tailed hawk was walking slowly with boys- the three of them seemingly on a calm stroll together in the park and me, just an on looker.  Their bright, wide eyes and huge smiles would have betrayed them to any real on looker, though, and they were just as awed as I was to have this gorgeous bird so calm and present among us. It walked towards me with them for a few seconds before pushing off with a gentle bend of it's body, splaying its great wings in the air to soar over the water and land in a tree on the other end of the pond.  After a moment of nearly pure silence watching it glide, the boys immediately burst into a fit of excited shrieks and exclamations and we all raced around what seemed like a much larger pond to get to the tree where it landed.  It sat there still when we arrived, now pretending it never walked among us and happily perched on a large branch. Oscar took a few great pictures of the bird and actually helped me identify what kind of hawk it was, being the avid nature lover he already is.

After spending a decent amount of time hoping the hawk would come back down to us, we decided to try and hike up a huge, mountainous hill that lay on that side of the pond. The ground was wet and soft, though, from recent winter weather, and after a few slides and muddied hands, we decided another day would be better for that.  We completed the full circle back around to where we had left our lunches, a part of the path that I had yet to explore very often.  We found a buried fire hydrant at the base of the hill, some smooth limestone chips in shades of various greenish greys, and I found my new favorite tree.  The photo cannot possibly do it justice, but I swear it's magical.  When I saw it off to my right, I felt myself take a sudden gasp of breath and stood entranced before this tree as though the air around it was forcefield that stilled you in your step.  It's hard to describe how it appeared to me or the feeling it caused.  The trunk was a smooth, luminous grey, with shades of a dusty purple and almost glittering silver around it.  When I was standing there, the effect of the coloring in the easy, grey daylight was almost like the swirl inside those rubber balls with milky silver fluid in them. It wasn't the iridescent rainbows of bubbles or oil, but a pearly shimmer, like certain bowling balls or these toy balls I found a picture of. Oscar and Simon breezed by me and called after to have me come look at something by the bridge with them, but I literally felt immobilized, like there was some energy being emitted from this tree that I either needed to feel or draw in. I can't explain it very well without sounding a little cheesy.  But it was a deep connection, like a soul connection, the kind that grabs something between your ribs and holds fast and long.

I stood for a long while, trying to figure out why it had this effect on me and what it meant I should do. In the end I decided I need to keep returning to it and let it continue to move me in this way, that something greater will come than this one feeling, this one magnetization, and that I won't be able to know what that will be until it reveals itself to me.

Blog #6

Friday I packed a lunch and spent the little free time I had at the pond.  It seems that each week it gets increasingly difficult to find a good time to dedicate for 'blog time'.   I'm enjoying having a reason to purposefully take time to breathe and observe for a little while, and put aside all of the "to do's" still on my list.  Even if I get a somewhat anxious about fitting it all in, this time I spend remembering to calm myself, to retain a wide-eyedness about the world, always leaves me feeling satisfied.

Usually when I'm walking anywhere, I have my headphones in and am listening to music.  On these occasions to Schenley, I'm more aware of the sounds around me.  Crossing the street first to the path leading down to the pond, the familiar rush of car winds and tires are around, with horns in the distance and sometimes children squeals from different areas of the park around.  Descending the first set of steps on the hill, cut into the earth among the plants (I pause to wonder if I consider this now a part of 'nature'), I'm aware of my own footsteps, my leather gloves squeaking slightly on the metal railing, the beginnings of birds.  The second stairs let me forget even more so the world left above, and the stream water a little below my feet bubbles over pebbles and drips down it's pathway.  Rustles of leaves and brush, more tweets from birds flitting around the branches, scurries of animals darting quickly away from the approach of something foreign.  Winding around the path toward the water, a wind bristles past the pine trees and around the hollow in my ear, a dog at the far end of the pond barks a playful dare at its owner teasing it with a stick. With each step I feel my ears being less in tune to the sounds of a busier world I'm leaving behind, and encased instead with the small music of the park.

I am thinking about those sound machines people often use to ease themselves in to sleep.  White noise to fill the silence, and why it is so comforting.  Sometimes stillness and quiet can be too big, so consuming it makes your mind fill with even more noise than what's being heard around you.  Even in the silence of the forest, you're never completely surrounded with an all consuming blanket of quiet.  The natural world has its own soundtrack, and though I don't own one, I'm pretty sure most of those sound machines feature a variety of nature settings: babbling brook, rainforest, field crickets, etc.  I think because we are so ingrained with the sounds of where we've come from, this is the most comforting breed of the white noise.  Being surrounded with what our bodies know to listen to, what our ancestors years and years ago were constantly surrounded by, what they heard as they eased their own minds into sleep, is the most delicious form of comfort.  Walking around the pond, staring up at a blueing sky and feeling the wind chill my face, the sounds around the air are a music all their own.

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear 

 Forever the noise of these

 More than another noise

-Robert Frost

Blog #5: "If Not, Winter"

Yesterday, I went into the park a little after five, one of the latest times I've been to the pond.  It was cloudy because of the precipitation Pittsburgh has been having, so there wasn't much to see in the evening colors of the sky. The snow the past day or two has been light and constant, and I imagine this is what it might feel like to be inside a snow globe: constantly having your world speckled with dots of white descending around you, small patches of white on the grasses, bits of snowflake lasting a minute on an eyelash or a hand before fading away. As I made my way carefully down the frosty stone steps built into the hillside, it was lovely to see everything capped with the tiniest mounds of white. With the various grey shades of the trees, the puffy sky, and the black of the stones that made up the archway ahead of me, it felt like seeing the world through a black and white filter; a live-action, old time film.

I dedicated part of my exploration today to a closer inspection of some of the plants.  It's hard to get a good look at some of them for identification right now, because of all the weather abuse and slight death they've been enduring.  I'm no artist, but I took out my pen and paper and attempted to draw some of the plants I saw.  I sketched some of the white snakeroot I mentioned before, which has one of the most lovely winter lives. It grows hard and brittle, browns, but still retains its delicate structure and a bit of a tawny colored tuft.


Among a lot of the trodden-on brush along the side of the water, I found some bush-like plants that I sketched and looked up on the internet later.  On the Pittsburgh Parks website, under 'conservancy projects' I read how they had planted native tiarella and heuchera shrubs in 2003 to increase the sustainability of the wetland area.  I think a lot of the bushes I saw were winter versions of Heuchera Shrubs, but it's still hard to be sure.

Around the border of the pond on the left side, there are tall, grassy pond plants.  Some of them I think may be rush plants.  Others are the taller, bigger versions of what I thought were pussy willows, but every time I search on the internet I only get pussy willows.  Instead of having many, tiny fuzzy buds, they usually have a big, fat brown top about the side of a glass soda bottle. I remember my first grade teacher pointing them out to us and mentioning that they only grow near water.  If anyone knows what these are actually called, let me know.

Lastly, I wandered to the far end of the pond that I don't go to as often, where the ducks usually are if they're there.  In the woods on that side, I found my favorite type of tree- the paper birch.  White bark is one of the most lovely aspects of nature to me, the way it seems rolled out in circling strips around the trunk, the deep, scarred notches of dark brown or black, how smooth it is when you lay your hand on its body. I have a book Sappho's poetry translated by Anne Carson called "If Not, Winter".  It's mainly fragments of the writing that has endured time since she wrote it, and though some poems have great chunks of lines missing, even the fragmented ideas of what Sappho was speaking to are so affecting.  One of my favorites is simply: "I long and seek after."

The cover of the book makes me think of the paper birch, with its satin white and etching of tans and blacks along the binding. The books title, along with the bark of the paper birch, are some of the most romantic aspects of winter I can think of.  "If Not, Winter" as a title speaks to this longing, this anticipation of something lost or unattainable being able to be reached in the Winter season.  Perhaps it speaks of lovers, unable to see one another, separated, or maybe even too conflicted to find peace with each other at a time, having the winter to look forward to and resolve their love within.  This idea makes the starkness of winter, the cold, the bare raw spaces, the peeling white bark of the birch, the snow falling in slow procession around us into a picturesque scene so enchanting, so nostalgic, so romantic in its still, still quiet.

After some research, I learned that the first budding leaves on paper birch plants can be used to make tea if you collect them.  This might be now what I am most looking forward to in Spring: gathering tiny new leaves off the birch, pinching them inside of my metal strainer ball, steeping and drinking such a fresh tea. I have a strange infatuation with the idea of becoming a tree. Its a very prominent theme in my work, as I think I've mentioned before, and the idea of drinking something made from such a gorgeous tree, bringing the tree into my body, is so stirring for me.  If I were ever to be reincarnated or perhaps have been something in a previous life, I think it would be a tree. I wrote something for my prose poem class with Sheryl, a sort of fantastical imagining of a woman becoming part of a tree, and it's still in the works but I'll share it below.

The Fullness of Sap 

She travels the long way down the tree branch. It is enormous, the width of twice her waist, extending for miles. Each foot touches its underside to the etched line of wood, steals energy from the rawness inside. This is a dream but it is still important.  The bough she's chosen is a vibratory one to travel, full of the hard thick flow of sap inside the hollow, milking its way to the tips, sweet if you can get to it. Imagine how it feels to dip a finger in, how the thickness would surprise you, full of pressure, color of hard, glowing amber.

The wind pulls a little ahead and the branch begins to rise and dip, rise and dip. She lies her belly down on the wood, wraps herself around the hardness, doesn’t listen to the creak of the bending bough. Hands touching, thighs tight against the branch, she lays an ear against the surface, listens to the humming. It takes its time, warming, milking.

Imagine the branch could gasp open, take her in slowly, dipping a leg, the pressure pulling the other deeper, deeper, enveloping the small back, the belly, arms drawing in, further, further, the chest and collar bones submerging, pulling, pulling, while the wind blew them around. How full it would be, supple when the branch dips, tensing when it pulls up. 

What a marvelous thing, the branch muses, to be entered, and so gently.

Link to the Schenley Park information:
http://www.pittsburghparks.org/schenleyprojects