Jack Pine and Stars

Jack Pine and Stars

            Sitting on the porch at Tara Manor, measuring the evening shadows as they lengthen and thicken, I study the jack pine’s wild, extravagant growth, the way it reaches out to reject the commonplace of ‘tree’, as Milton Acorn rejected the commonplace of ‘poet’.
            The jack pine grows in radical disorder, sprouting here, there, anywhere the sea wind blows and its capricious nature dictates. Each limb of the jack pine bears a thin layer of salt, borne in from Passamaquoddy Bay by thin fingers of air that sow salt on branches and needles. Broken branches, untidy crows’ nests limb-tangled like grim, bedraggled hair sprout out from on high. Lower down the tree extends a branch, held out towards me like a helping hand.
            Charcoal shadows fill in the gaps between darkening trees. Shy deer emerge, step by cautious step, drifting their sylvan ghosts, delicate, across footpath and lawn. Wrapped in a scarf of peace, I forget the city’s hustle and bustle. Stars poke peepholes in the dark. I try to name each constellation, as it traces its new-to-me path across the indifferent evening sky.
            I look around: more jack pines, no two the same. How could they be? There’ll never be another poet like Milton, another book like his Jack Pine Sonnets, no tale like his own tale told in his own inimitable way.

13 thoughts on “Jack Pine and Stars”

  2. Hi Roger. Glad to see this here, in the company of the famous painting. Trees are a group I love. They commune with one another and they try to speak with us. Your time at the gardens certainly made an impression ( on both writer and reader)!

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      • hey Roger. I dreamed about you the other night. I dreamed you were a famous biologist and you produced the world’s first spontaneously generated cyanobacterium. There were other bacteria in the petridish but they were quite fragile. Your cyanobaterium was strong and glowed!

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