Poems by M.L. Lyons

An Ardor for Trees

by M.L. Lyons

From Canary Summer 2020

M.L. Lyons lives among the forested wetlands of the Tualatin Valley, where the Tualatin River flows through a mosaic of agricultural and urban land to the forests of Oregon's Chehalem and Coast Range Mountains. Given its many bends and twists, the river was named “Tualatin” or "lazy river" by the Atfalati people who lived in the Tualatin Basin before European settlement. The Tualatin watershed also sustains such native plants as Fireweed, Aster, Red Columbine, Yarrow, Kinnikinnick, and Beach Strawberry.

Four hundred and sixteen million years ago the first trees emerged in the force of sun and the softness of rain -- the great canopies of the Devonian Forest. Palm-like fronds, simple in structure, but profound in their origination, transformed this world with each branch. They absorbed the carbons from a previously toxic-laced environment and released immense new breaths of oxygen. And with the shade of these great limbs, the oxygen that permeated and the matter they created, this planet became able to sustain life as we know it.

Every animal that swims, slithers, crawls or leaps depends on the prone stillness of trees. In and of themselves, trees are pure growth. Seeds germinate into sentinels that seek the sky, flexed heavenward. Trees abound with creatures yet emanate a solitude that pervades even their lowest branches. This strength in silence and power in stillness makes us consider what is the fellowship of branches, what is held within while being so singular. Ultimately we have chosen trees as a metaphor to describe ourselves. The family tree, burgeoning with life, winding its way down to a single trunk. A singular self, solitary yet descendant of so many bodies, so many branches.

To humans, trees are as emblematic as illustrations we draw of our bodies—from our crown to our legs. Even our minds are dark, forested inscape—full of dendrites spread within and receptors of the world outside, creating the great branches of memory traced within our skulls. Each tree manifests its own unique shape, a singular architecture of itself, a self-creation shaped by circumstance and conditions all accidental or fated. Rather than bear our resemblance, perhaps it is we who bear theirs, for these creatures hold greater mysteries—their entire selves endlessly useful to so many, their function and nature sustaining to all things.

As humans we describe fallen trees as tender nurse logs providing a seedbed for further life, each seedling cushioned by lichen and moss.

It is precisely in a tree’s stillness and its prone growth that we as wanderers and gatherers on this Earth should reflect. Trees of life. Trees as life itself. They were the first bedding, the first fruits, the first safe place that we in our various manifestations ever experienced, whether we climbed down from them with our gangly limbs or lifted ourselves into them with a firm hand. They gave us scope and height we could never attain otherwise, and when there was no landmark to show us the way, we climbed their branches in order to see where we were and what lay ahead. Our first sense of effortless movement towards the sky was not with wings, but in the branches of a tree.

We who are so bound by gravity, who struggle to resist and yet seek to fly, strive endlessly away from this earth... we do not share the wisdom of trees. They offer the lesson of how to remain, how to stand in one place and to sustain yet reach upwards. To be in one place, and find strength even in the most adverse circumstances, this is their nature. Trees are rooted in the most beautiful sense—suggesting some hidden cause or source, ancient in age and rarely turned over to the human eye, a source that is hidden under the everyday, beneath the very ground we step on. These ancestral depths are a tree’s nature. Even its roots can reach unfathomable distances, down hundreds of feet to places we cannot see.

Among us, they are the quietest of companions, the silent millions which wordlessly accompany us during our daily lives. Alone in a field, flanked by a yard or gathered in unison, trees are the great collective that has no tribe. They settle soundlessly and without great fanfare. Upon last count, three trillion of them still inhabit this world, and when we break down the numbers, for every man, woman and child who breathes at this very moment, there are 61 trees that breath for us, providing an alchemical counterpoint to all our restlessness. All those relentless passions for our needs, our wants, even for each other, cannot be sustained without them.

It is natural then that everyone should fall in love with a tree at least once in their lifetime. Preferably more times. A love of trees is the most innocent yet instinctive of all loves. And it is now, perhaps more than ever, that we must find ourselves most rooted in this love in order to sustain this moment and all the moments which follow, this place and all the places we have seen and those we will never see.