The Trees Stand Watch
Last month as I lay ill
and dying still,
my neighbor's trees
kept watch
Their bony arms raised
to the skies
defying winter's wrath,
blackly outlining
starkest cold felt deep
within the marrow
of my bones,
and without as well
Then the birches, with March,
heralded false Spring briefly,
with a fuzzy show of slightest green
worn off again in hours
by the ice-storm
I felt surround my heart,
my soul, my everything
Birch is hard-wood
and so am I, so together
we stood strong,
weathered the non-season
Refusing to give up the ghost,
die, as expected;
we toughed out the weeks
until real Spring
Deigned to put in
her appearance
and now the trees stand watch,
their branches lovely,
dancing full of leaves
and grace and hope,
and yet, like sentinels,
they guard my being,
not allowing death
to steal in and make off
with anything
I am loath
to give up
just yet.
Copyright 2008 by S.E. Ingraham
Critique by Jendi Reiter
In this month's critique poem, "The Trees Stand Watch", S.E. Ingraham writes with a simplicity and cleanness of style that befits the narrator's stripped-down spiritual condition. A crisis can force us to abandon the luxury of ironic distance, the fear that our emotions will seem too sentimental if we don't surround them with elaborate artistic tricks. Sincerity is born of desperation.
Illness foregrounds our animal nature and its limitations, sometimes a rude surprise for the artist accustomed to exploring the seemingly infinite territory of the imagination. Here, the narrator learns how to remain present with her painful body by finding kinship with the strong, protective, long-lived trees.
With powerful directness, the first stanza introduces the primal antagonists at work in the poem, death and solitude ("Last month as I lay ill/and dying still") versus life and caregiving ("my neighbor's trees/kept watch"). I think it's significant that we know this detail, that these are the neighbor's trees rather than the protagonist's own property or simply "some trees". "Neighbor" instantly connects the trees to companionship and a kind of unconditional solidarity with strangers in need, as in "love thy neighbor as thyself".
The word "still" in the second line adds no new information to "ill and dying"—one could even call it redundant—and yet I feel it is the pivot of the whole stanza. Some words do extra duty in a poem, common little words with so many meanings that they add layers of significance without calling attention to themselves. The internal rhyme "ill/still" gives a poetic cadence to what would otherwise be a very plain-spoken sentence. "Still" as adverb suggests the long, slow death that we dread—"still dying". "Still" as adjective, meanwhile, sets the tone of stillness, of patient observation. The invalid comes to reinterpret her unwanted immobility in light of the more positive steadfastness of the trees.
The subsequent stanzas flesh out the connection between the speaker and the trees with realistic sensory details. These feel like the genuine observations of a bed-ridden person who has been studying the trees from her window, day after day, perhaps noticing their moods more closely than she ever did in her busy, healthy life. The reader's heart experiences a sympathetic pang as recovery is glimpsed, then lost again: "a fuzzy show of slightest green/worn off again in hours/by the ice-storm/I felt surround my heart". The security reached at the poem's end is earned by this moment of looking into the void.
Something in the rhythm of the final lines falls flat, for me. Perhaps it is because the last seven or eight lines lack the physical imagery that enriches the rest of the poem. The concluding words do not seem strong enough to be stretched out over this many lines. The qualifier "just yet", as the speaker's final word, undercuts the triumph of survival. I would have liked to see a continuation of the parallelism between the condition of the trees and that of the speaker. What sensations experienced by the now-healthy person are analogous to the trees' springtime vigor and delicate beauty? Instead we shift to an abstract explanatory mode after "sentinels", losing some of the sensory grounding that makes this poem succeed.
Though the seasons as metaphor for our mortality are a familiar poetic trope, Ingraham makes it fresh because she is interested in the trees in their own right, not simply as reflections of the human character's feelings. Her real subject is the natural cycle of rebirth that comforts us in our weakness by reminding us that we have companions on the journey.
Where could a poem like "The Trees Stand Watch" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Princemere Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: September 30
$250 prize for unpublished poems, from the literary journal of a nondenominational Christian college
Second Light Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
British writers' group for older women poets offers 300 pounds for poems by women over 30; previously published work accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2008 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Categories: Poetry Critiques
