The Birch Trees
The birch trees are too shy to speak.
They could tell you a thing or two.
How the grasses tap their roots. How
long the summer drought. How wet
the warm whiskered rain. Of course
they love the winter when they hold
the snow, the below-zero cold inside
their bark. No need to complain. No
need for even words. They know
the earth turns, the planets waltz. But
the birch trees are too shy to speak.
By Jim Johnson
Cedarhome
1.
Make no mistake. The cedar
Is no weeping willow,
Has nothing to do
With women washing their hair.
What then? Hunchback? Gnome?
It isn’t either. Whatever
Shape it assumes—pueblo ladder
Leaning into the skylight,
Upright as fire, crouched over
Like some dumb oversized
Bird that migrated into the muck
Of the early paleozoic—
Its feathery leaves are evergreen.
Cedar is a survivor.
It takes root
And stays root,
Becoming whatever it clings to.
It likes lakes and rivulets,
Swamps and sloughs, the dark beer
And winesap of thins
Seeping back to ground zero.
It sucks them up, it lifts them from nothing
Up to its crown and leaves them there.
It wants wet, but, lacking that,
Can pass as a cold country cactus.
A patient, camel kind of plant,
Survive on blasted granite switchbacks.
Cedar is sinewy, tougher than we are.
The way cedar trees
Smell makes me think
Of things I like to drink:
Wellwater, gin, after-the-rain jasmine tea.
They smell like star anise,
They smell like the sea.
They are none of these.
Cedar is a thing in itself.
2.
Just learning to talk, I watched
My father’s father shiver cedar shakes,
Slit them to splinters
With a flick of his jackknife,
Shave off curls, auburn, blond,
To kindle kitchen stove and furnace.
My mother kept her wedding dress
In a cedar chest to stave off
Moth and rot. She trusted cedar
With special treasures.
My father taught me to know one
When I saw one.
Cedar must be my relative.
Around it, I turn primitive.
I take one for my totem.
Why not? The tree has a worthy history.
In paintings by Zen masters,
They often appear, not quite there
In the mist. American Indians
Censed themselves with sage
And cedar. Swedes and Finns
Built saunas out of it
And whipped their wet bodies
Ruddy clean with greens of it.
Solomon beamed a temple
For the tribes of Israel
With the cedars of Lebanon.
3.
Can you believe it?
The Bible says, “Heaven
Lies north through the cedars.”
I have doubted the word
But never the tree’s
Fine facticity.
I once thought the twisted
Trunks perverted. And then one night
By firelight I saw the light:
The torque of the trunk tightens
In proportion to the persistence
With which it screws into muck and bedrock.
And the cedar’s positive power
To retain and loose life after death
Proves, inversely,
The force of the process aforesaid,
Releasing, of course, the corollary:
To wit, death is only apparent,
Not nought.
How could I doubt it?
Hell, I was burning the evidence!
The deadfall I’d cut to the heart
Undid rivery ribbons of fire and smoke,
Streamers untwisting into the heavens,
What a warm, what an empirical proof!
The island I was on was adrift, a raft,
And the moon hung up
On a branch, like a lantern. And then,
As if I needed a talking to,
A straggling line of geese,
A whole host of snows and blues,
Floated over, gaggling north.
4.
I didn’t used to care much
What they did with me after I died.
Now I think I’d like to be planted
In a coffin knocked out of cedar planks.
What sweet seasoning that would be.
What a sloughing of flesh, what a mulch,
What peat-rich mouldering.
What lingering commingling,
What a cedarhome.
By Bart Sutter
Where it Ran
A week past the deluge
you can see where it ran
through the box canyon,
sand braided into rivulets,
fanning out into the river
No point asking the cottonwood
what it sounded like, how it felt
when the water runneled down
the crevasses of its twin trunks
Its height and girth belie its youth
and even short-term memories of trees
are too deep to fathom, the language
of cottonwoods having to do with yellow,
heart-shaped leaves on flattened petioles
riffling way up high, above the sandstone walls,
even on calm days inclined
to be excited
By Laurie Allmann
Poet Bios:
Jim Johnson, a former Duluth Poet Laureate, has lived most of his life in Northern Minnesota where he developed an awareness and concern for local culture and history, as well as for the natural world. He has published ten books of poetry and now lives in Decorah, Iowa, and Isabella, Minnesota. His previous collections include Text For Our Nomadic Future (Red DragonflyPress, 2018), Yoik (Red Dragonfly Press, 2015), and The First Day of Spring in Northern Minnesota (Red Dragonfly Press, 2012), which won the Northeast Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award.
Bart Sutter received the Minnesota Book Award for poetry with The Book of Names, for fiction with My Father’s War and other Stories, and for creative non-fiction with Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map. Among other honors, he has won a Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant (Sweden), a Loft-McKnight Award, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and the Bassine Citation from the Academy of American Poets. Sutter has written for public radio, he has had four verse play produced, and for more that thirty years, he performed as one half of The Sutter Brothers a poetry-and-music duo. Bart Sutter lives on a hillside overlooking Lake Superior with his wife, Dorothea Diver.
Laurie Allmann received the Minnesota Book Award for her collection of essays, Far from Tame, and a gold medal in regional poetry from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association (MIPA) for her recent book of poetry, An Hour from Now. She is a freelance conservation writer, a founding co-editor of Agate, and is currently serving as Writer-in-Residence for the nonprofit North Woods & Waters of the St. Croix Heritage Area (NWW). She lives in the St. Croix Valley.
