A lovely poem by Mary Oliver. She sees a dead tree and it remindes her of something or someone she has lost in her life. She talks of the tree which she loved. There are other trees. But this one she loved. It can be the same for all the losses in our lives, since everyday we lose something, as Stephen Levine reminds us. Every day
on my way to the pond
I pass the lightning-felled,
chesty,
hundred-fingered, black oak
which, summers ago,
swam forward when the storm
laid one lean yellow wand against it, smoking it open
to its rosy heart.
It dropped down
in a veil of rain,
in a cloud of sap and fire,
and became what it has been ever since--
a black boat
floating
in the tossing leaves of summer,
like the coffin of Osiris
descending
upon the cloudy Nile.
But, listen, I'm tired of that brazen promise:
death and resurrection.
I'm tired of hearing how the nitrogens will return
to the earth again,
through the hinterland of patience--
how the mushrooms and the yeasts
will arrive in the wind--
how they'll anchor the pearls of their bodies and begin
to gnaw through the darkness,
like wolves at bones--
what I loved, I mean, what that tree--
tree of the moment--tree of my own sad, mortal heart--
and I don't want to sing anymore of the way
Osiris came home at last, on a clean
and powerful ship, over
the dangerous sea, as a tall
and beautiful stranger.
Mary Oliver, The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond
