A Place Born of Choosing Another Way

“Director’s Notes” are excerpts from our monthly email newsletter, “Stories from the Garden.” Subscribe and see past issues here.

Dear Friends,

Here in the garden, poems wait among the palms. It is one of the delights of my life to share them with those who join us here. Already in the first month of this new year, we’ve welcomed a dozen volunteers to help us tend the garden, and on two sunny Friday mornings in January, we welcomed Open Garden Days visitors. As we hike together down into the heart of the garden, we find our way to these poems. “One Valley” emerges from the dry stream bed, in the silence that I hear now/day and night on its way to the sea. “High Fronds” perches up in the canopy among the tallest of the Caryota palms. Tumbling upward note by note out of the night/ and the hush of the dark valley/ and out of whatever has not been there “The Laughing Thrush” sings. Traces of William’s participation in the well-being of this place show themselves in the poems he wrote here in the second half of his life, and in the garden’s palms. It is a joy to encounter and share both together with each walk.

But since the Maui fires last August, and amidst the cacophony of wars the world over, I have found myself drawn back to William’s earlier work. I waded once again into the despair of The Lice. There, William faces the burdens of human exceptionalism in “For a Coming Extinction,”  shame in “Avoiding News by the River,” incredulity in “When the War is Over.” Next, I fell into The Miner’s Pale Children, and down into the astonishing prose piece “Unchopping a Tree.” Wide-eyed, I tumbled through its intricate instructions for undoing what can’t be undone.

Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nest that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated.

Before further directives for this futile endeavor are furnished, William makes plain our self-imposed alienation from nature, and the impact of our audacity in thinking ourselves separate from a so-called “natural world.”

Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men’s work.

When at last the tree’s trunk is erected, splinters straightened and fixatives applied, next comes the sawdust and the question of the chips.

There is a certain beauty, you will notice at moments, in the pattern of the chips as they are fitted back into place. You will wonder to what extent it should be described as natural, to what extent man-made. It will lead you on to speculations about the parentage of beauty itself, to which you will return.

And finally, when the tree is reassembled and we hear the thud of settlement, and the warning creak deep in the intricate joinery, we part ways with the text like this:

The first breeze that touches its dead leaves all seems to flow into your mouth. You are afraid the motion of the clouds will be enough to push it over. What more can you do? What more can you do? But there is nothing more you can do. Others are waiting. Everything is going to have to be put back. 

I carry “Unchopping a Tree” with me to the top of the ridge, overlooking the thousands of palms that now thrive here. This garden is not a place made of putting things back together, and couldnʻt be. It is instead a place born of choosing another way, of cultivating conditions for new life to take root, where once life was taken out. Here on the ridge I often share “Rain at Night.”

after an age of leaves and feathers
someone dead
thought of this mountain as money
and cut the trees
that were here in the wind
in the rain at night

I read the last lines anew:

but the trees have risen one more time
and the night wind makes them sound
like the sea that is yet unknown
the black clouds race over the moon
the rain is falling on the last place 

With aloha, 

Sonnet