The Singing Tree


Wide, squatty, and hollow,
it's almost not a tree at all,
but a cave, or an instrument,
some kind of woodwind:
there is room enough inside
for a man and a guitar.   

                ~

My great-uncle's voice
seeps out of branches and bark
like an oracle.
Our fate is a tune that coils
its way into the clearing,
unsteady notes amplified
as if by a megaphone,
the nonsense chorus of
Waltzing Matilda
filtering down from the canopy,
my cousins dancing in a circle
around its sonorous girth.

                ~          

In August, sing becomes a noun --
not a family picnic, but a family
sing.  We come armed with songbooks
and lemonade.  This is the way
we have come together,
our voices meeting each other
in familiar chorus, the tree
vibrating like a conductor.

                ~


The tree has been hollow
since my father was a little boy,
but even now its naked boughs
surprise like sickness in summer,
this thick-boned skeleton,      
odd among the density
of island growth.
And its strange voice,
a dying aria I have heard
all of my life.

                ~

I watch my great-aunt sing
"America the Beautiful"
at her husband's funeral
It's Thanksgiving.
The hymn book shakes
in her knotted hand,
telling its own story,
but her firm voice transforms
those shining seas into     
my great-uncle's famous blue eyes.
She finds him alive in there,
and sings him into a place
he has never been
but always will be now.
This year death has come
in threes.  This is how it is
sometimes, jarring
but half-anticipated after the first one,
like triplets in their graceful
stumble through a measure,
the deaths of three great-uncles.

                ~

The singing tree is
actually two trees.   
I only realized it this year.
At root level they began
to grow together,
their two lives tangling
into a massive oaken one.
Eventually this intertwining
killed them both.
At the base, our singing hole
is a small cavern
created before they converged.
How unlikely, the way
the world will shape itself.

        ~

Nearby the beach sings
a different song,  
our feet harmonizing
with the low-tide sand,
a humming stride over
the wave-hardened patterns
that stretch like fish scales
into marshweed.  This
off-pitched overtone
is a reply to the ocean
and all of its voices.
When we are gone,
there are always gulls
shrieking their anxious
refrains along the Sound.

        ~

Today I find the tree posed
in the stillness of prayer.
I'm alone here for the first time
and it feels coffin-like inside.
Hunched in the dampness and dirt,
I try my first note, the opening
line of Camptown Races,
doo-dah rising above me
and lodging itself
in the trunk's inner-skin.
Buried inside, I can't hear
my voice echoing into the woods,
but I know where it has gone:
out among beech and maple and oak,
broadcasting its notes into the singing world.   



Nina Riggs