Soil from Stone

A hawthorn grows on a windswept hill. Its bark is scarred from a tether long cut, and a groove semicircular where the wire once looped round. The tree flesh folded over the constriction as it grew, inevitable expansion strangling itself until the moisture, cold rain, snow, and fog and the changing temperatures finally oxidized the formerly galvanized steel. Flecks yet remain in the woody skin of the tree, a blackened dimple in place of a long, dead tie. Fragments of orange, gray, and black lie in the grass like the corpse of a whip snake long dessicated and dissolved, the tree set free at last, forever scarred.

A foot or so below on the wood lies another scar more brutal, more damaging. No tree could survive such a wound, a decapitation, and one tree did not as this hawthorn lives on through the roots of another, its own native roots torn and scattered by wind and forgotten. A gnarled, crooked tree died so that this thorn tree could live through the work of grafting, of having been uprooted, dismembered, resurrected by careful, calloused hands. The scar a reminder not of pain but of life and of qualities valued in old, gray eyes. The roots creased the ground, stony and drab, like strong fingers breaking gravel into fine soil, drawing life and nourishment from…from nothing.

These stones never lived before, their granite surfaces marked by deep-fired crystals, but not a fossil can be found in even one pebble. No limestone here, no caliche or sandstone. Only lifeless, sterile, metamorphic children of a former monument, a mountain peak, worn and etched, crumbled by time and stirred by wind, bird, rodent, and invertebrates uncountable and the dusted remains of a thousand generations of things that never lived here, could never live in this cold, barren expose, until a single seed set by a startled, lost bird in a narrow, shallow cleft sprouted by freezing ice melt from a glacier with nowhere to hide from the sun so close in the thin, thin air. The tree grew gnarled, never blossomed. No flowers to see nor bees to hear.

So came the planter and cut the tree down to save his prize, save it for a lonely hidden life too far to be seen, too high to know warmth. Now blossoms the hawthorn up the hill from an imported hive. Now admires the planter its thorns and frost-bitten branches, lonely and scarred still growing in rocks.

Two birds called across a raucous wood so lonely.
They sang awhile and wondered at the distance.

“Why do none nearby sing like you so lovely?”
Cried the one to the other across the miles.

“They all want to be something else than what
They were meant to be,” whistled her reply.

“This space between us really must be cut.
I’ll come to you this time, then we’ll trade.”

“That’s fair, I think. It’s nice to find a bird
Who loves the old hymns and sings them out so well.”

So when the time was good, the whole woods heard
A new duet, two voices in just one place for a time.
But alas work on nests recalled at the end of day.
Time went by and the little birds sang and played
To each other about their work, the hunts for hay
And seed and friends among the crows and owls.
The hen flew next, to see how lived the first
Among the wings and leaves of that other world.

“You are alone in grace and beauty,” he versed.
“Stay here with me. We’ll sing and fly together.”

She considered, but knew the truth already.
“I’d miss my friends and home by the springs.
It’s lonely here and the air is so unsteady.”

“Then I’m determined to come to you,” he sang.
“There’s no song like yours among these leaves.
Nothing to keep me here and besides we’re done
With half our days. Why live alone like thieves?”

“‘Tis natural now that we are more than friends
And I’d like it more if you were with me here.”

He left the dry north slopes to build a nest
In the branches near the water and his dear.
They sang and played and danced all spring.

Finally he said, “I think it’s coming time to make
This change for real. Come now and perch with me.
You and I are a perfect match to satisfy this ache.”

She cocked her head to one side and said, “I’m not sure
That this is right. I love you, but we’ll never be one.”

“I don’t understand,” he cried. “After all this time,
Why do you now say no to what seemed done?”

She sighed and shrugged her wings. “There’s just too much
That’s so very different between you and me.
Your plumage is too gray and your song too soft.
When you fly you ascend at all the wrong degree.
We don’t sing in perfect harmony like we should.
I love you, and I’m sorry, but this will never effect.”

He could naught but grip his branch and croon his pain.

“I must go, but tell me first if you hate or reject
As our friendship means more to me than you can know.”

The light now gone from his eyes, but loving still
He said, “How can I hate the heart within my breast
Even so broken and full of pain distilled?”

The heavens vanish.

You fold them up like a cloth.

Your Word never ends.