TREE GRAFFITI

A hillside, not far from where I go

to escape the race below

holds a goodly stand of Aspen.

Up that high their bark is parchment white,

stained by the snow that buries them, chest deep,

in all but the summer days when I come puffing.

But I’m not the first of my kind here,

on two legs walking, not by far.

The trees wear the scars of other walkers

who wrote a memory and moved on.

You must have seen it in your own place,

the Aspen’s hide is everywhere a tempting canvas.

Tree graffiti, like the urban kind,

invades the soul, but be resigned to it.

Neither you nor I can cover old word-scars

with a whitewash of living bark.  

Anyway, when the wind moves a low branch

like the swing of an empty school yard,

I want to know a memory of the place.

To hear the echo of its laughter and tears.

Who else puffed here in summers past?

Read the trees.

Frank Williams did, in nineteen fifty-three.

In a later year, so did Kathrine and LaMar,

and they walked in love.

Tom writes he saw a cougar here;

we can assume that it saw him.

There was snow on the ground

in nineteen something-seven

when young Bill Tanner got his first buck.

Over here, inside a heart, are Helen and LaMar.

LaMar, again.  I wonder,

should we mourn or cheer for Kathrine?

Frank and Adam and my Grandpa Bill

also signed in, just to say they were here.

Other names are hard to read,

their owners not knowing the art of signing.

To be remembered, cut your letters deep,

your words thin.

No, I’m not the first of my kind here,

but glad for the company I keep.

For we walk our groves, not to be alone,

but to connect.  Like the Aspen

that sprout from the feet of older trees,

Tom and Kathrine, and you and I, 

share the same root, underground, just out of sight.

And as one, we, like the stand, are ancient,

and greater than any single walker

that ever came puffing by,

up this high,

on a summer’s day.

S. R. Thorley