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| Cherry Blossoms 2013, Aaron Mosby |
Lisa Hiton, "In Response to Trees," Two Poems, The Adroit Journal, Issue 12
For two weeks in
April, Washington, DC partakes in an annual ritual called the Cherry Blossom Festival. The epicenter of the
festivities is the Tidal Basin where 1,800 Somei-Yoshino trees burst into pink
and white bloom. The landscape is typically garrisoned with a phalanx of
amateur photographers armed with digital cameras trying to capture the
effervescent blossoms that seem to start falling the day they bloom. Having been one of those camera-armed soldiers, I can tell you that there is a sense
of urgency that compels one to take as many pictures as one can before the sun
goes down or before it rains or before our short spring morphs into our long
summer. Rarely have I simply gone to the Tidal Basin and just sat underneath
one of these blooming trees and just listened to what they were saying.
Lisa Hiton does
pause to listen and offers us, "In Response to
Trees," a vivid, contemplation of the language of nature. The poem, published in
Issue 12 of The Adroit Journal, starts off with an acknowledgement of T.S.
Eliot's cruel spring, "In winter I knew them all / as one dead
thing," but seems to sluff off the despair in the next line, "but now
I love to watch them blossom." For Hiton, it seems, the past is not
something to be memorialized, it is merely the last guidepost on the uncharted
path towards new discoveries.
The guide on this
particular path, a Japanese tree, like so many soothsayers, seems to speak in
riddles. While it "translates / beauty into sunlike white and pink,"
it leaves enough mystery that our narrator states, "I lie under them / deciphering
/ their shapes. …" There is a juxtaposition here between the primary
language of nature that we can tap into with our senses, "sunlike white
and pink," and the secondary (tertiary, etc.) language of thought, that
attempts to reconfigure natural occurrences, like the blossoms of a tree, into
something geometric like "shapes." This movement leads to the general
problem of thought, eloquently stated in the poem, "…How to a give a name / to something you know so well…"
In the turn of a
word, Hiton takes us back to our first real encounter with nature,
"…:Mother," in what seems like an attempt to discover something we've
always known. But as we've learned in
the first lines of the poem, what we claim to know is often loss and death.
"I know you are afraid
of my love
when I watch the little round discs fall
suicidality towards me. …"
Here, the fear of
love is wrapped in the loss of love which is inextricably linked to the
possession of love. And while we all know this natural occurrence, all too well,
are we not in the same boat as the narrator who states:
"…I am afraid
of what I might call them
while they are in the air…"?
Here there seems to
be a fear of naming the gravitational body that pulls us away from our first
love "Mother" because that body takes the unfortuitous position of
becoming a new "Mother" who will fear our love and who we will one
day fall away from. And, again, we know this but what we know, as Hiton shows, is not as lovely as what we can dream:
"tiny petals like eyelids
dropping down. The first time I dreamt
of falling
it was peaceful like this:--
nameless world, filled with green light…"
Nature takes us out
of the tongue-tied world of our conscious mind into the sensory-guided world
of the unconscious. Here, the act
"of falling" from love to love is free of named loves lost or loves
to be lost. It is simply a force of nature as natural as light itself.
Hiton leaves us with
a coda that echoes the narrator's first question, "by what name, Japanese
tree, / by what name, Mother?" And for me, that is the beauty of this
poem. It reminds us that the answers to the biggest riddles of our lives lie in
a return to nature and the language of light, vibration and touch.
Next year, I'm going
to leave the digital camera at home as I walk through the cherry blossom trees.
Instead, I'm going to have my dear friend Lisa's poetry in my heart as I ask
the trees the big questions.
