Biologists are watching closely as the blazes encroach on old-growth redwood trees in Northern and Central California, where some giants are more than 1,000 years old and are known by individual names.
—NPR, August 23, 2020
My friend from California asks how a tree perceives time
as we walk a forest of second- and third-growth trees.
Down the road in Snoqualmie, an old-growth cut lies in state, enshrined in a former train station, nearly the size of the ancient train engines forever idled on the tracks.
Markers of human time scar its rings: the Norman Conquest, the Kittyhawk flew, WWII.
I’ve known my friend for several rings of a fairly young tree. Our time marked in decades of scorched love, then marriage branching with children.
We admire a Douglas Fir stump, the moss clustering in pockets. A hemlock sapling roots from its base, nursing toward the sky.
Recently I asked my son and his wife about baby names. They are not pregnant.
I fish for a way of claiming.
The oldest living redwoods are named after generals,
even as the monuments to these men are removed.
The only female-named Sequoia, ‘Mother of the Forest’, rose 323 feet high until they stripped and shipped 60 tons of her bark for the 1855 New York Crystal Palace exhibition.
A 1908 fire cremated her.
Redwoods can survive wildfires. Even fully charred trees can sprout again
from buds lying dormant beneath bark.
And the truly dead, those burnt to the core, cut to the stump sheathed in forest green velvet evening gowns, will nurse young seedlings into trees bearing names.
A few years back, I drove through the Redwoods. Since then, millions of forest acres have burned. I can’t even begin to name that loss.
My friend and I worry about our children and their unborn, unnamed children.
After our walk, we’ll drink wine and discuss the books we’ve read, made on recycled paper—
from trees logged long ago.
On NPR, they say that the younger generation of redwoods is at risk. The old ones, 95% gone.
What remains is new and dense
like the housing development my son and his wife have moved into.
Or the ones being built here, along the Snoqualmie River.
When we walk along the river, we see trees tagged in a forest. For survival or slaughter we wonder.
The younger forests burn hotter and fire spreads more easily.
My friend stops to photograph the trees—the fractured light, the spectrum of green.
I recently read about the symbiosis between trees. How a Douglas fir under stress signals to a nearby Ponderosa pine through the fungal network. A forest floor of conversation, the hum of root and tinder.
Until he died, I always imagined my father as a Douglas fir, his sturdy presence.
Now the Foo Fighter lyric It’s times like these time and time again seeds my brain. How will nature write this ending?
This poem first appeared in Split Rock Review.
—
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. Her third book of poetry, Tic Tic Tic, is forthcoming in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. Heidi’s aurhored of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com
