The middle of May notwithstanding, it's been windy where we live, with strong hammer-blow gusts making the house groan and the car in the driveway shudder.
Last week a branch broke from an ancient tree and fell across my windshield, shattering it into kaleidoscopic shards that cost $500 to make whole again.
Every morning we pick up tree bits from the front lawn.
American poet Robert Frost once wrote a poem called Tree At My Window in which he refers to a tree as a "thing next most diffuse to cloud"--which is maybe a bit awkward but imagistically arresting; it has occurred to me, however, that Frost's tree is strictly a fairsweather tree. Ours are so tempest-tossed lately that they are not so much "diffuse" as agitato and aghast. They creak and thrash in the fist-pounding gales, and fantasize, I am certain, about calm.
Frost, addressing the tree by his window, says:
"That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather."
Well, I dunno. In the big blows we've been having lately, the brows of the trees themselves have been furrowed with inner weather too--whereas I've beenolying sleepless (no weather at all), wondering if the roof were going to lift off or if a stout limb of the tree outside my window were going to break free and join me in bed.
Lengths of tree fall on our house and onto our lawns like bits of soft meteorite. Is this flotsam of the air the stuff of which lyric is made? Is a fallen branch a stanza of something? I believe it might be, if I could get out from under the downfall of wood-plunge. I've been remembering my Chicken Little rhymes from childhood. The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Go tell the King!! But what King pray tell?
