Copper
Beech
"I
think maybe I’ve healed," I said to her.
It was
Mother’s Day around three in the afternoon,
her first
time in the little grove, and we had been
standing
under my mother’s tree. Now she was admiring
the
graceful strength, the tall sturdiness of it,
as we
slowly circled underneath and looked up
through
wide and tall branches, noticing how the leaves
tend to a
metallic coppery green in spring.
(Later
they will linger in autumn’s fire, the last to flame.)
This beech
is true to the striking character of its kind.
It is at
once as planted in the earth as an elephant,
with thick
trunk and thick wide branches near the ground
that
extend horizontally, impossibly far
and with
gray bark that is elephant gray, wrinkling
in
half-circles where the heavy elbows form at the trunk
and yet it
leaps
upward
with a swift lightness into the reaches of light
like a
great dancer, its higher branches thin and soaring
straight
up as if spirit rather than matter possessed them,
their
leaves thirsting like the fingertips of the soul.
I of
course have come here often over the years--alone--
to
remember my mother, who gave me art out of ruin.
Strange,
isn’t it, that she should have borne me twice:
once into
a bitter futility and once into beauty.
And it was
forever before I felt not my pain but hers,
not my
regret, not my nurtured anguish but that which came
before
mine and endowed mine and outlasted mine.
Only the
tree could have taken me out of myself
and
brought me to her life, to the feel of it.
Yet
exactly how a tree can do this, I can’t say—
perhaps
the reassurance of beauty? for she taught me that,
though
before, it had always turned on the exquisiteness of grief.
And now I
am here, not alone but with the woman
who has
come into the last season of my life,
like a
summer oak in full foliage refusing winter,
and has
led me out that for a time I am free of it.
I cannot
say how this has happened either except
beauty of
a deeper kind has surely been at work,
for now
the grief is only the memory of grief.
And as for
my mother, it’s hard to say if she was
in her
life anything like the copper beech she loved.
David
Cummings