I could say that I recognized you when you were stately and
towering. I could say that I remember your
gracious shade and the time a hawk rested regally within your embrace. I might suggest that the song of the wind was
most especially lovely when it played on your leaves, and the late sun’s caress
painted your bark with more loving care than it caressed all the others. I could say that your proud carriage was the standard for all the others in my woods. But this praise would be more charitable than
true, because I rushed past you most days and forgot you were there. You were so far away and my world was so
close to the ground. You were hidden by
two holly trees that sheltered the birds that I fed each winter, and you grew
on the edge of the hillside just as it fell away into the weedy and thorny woods. All that camouflage allowed me to forget you.
Last fall you exhaled with a deep and stunning sigh, and your
collapse to the earth, as you leaned for the first and last time, shook my heart. It was in the dark of night that you tossed
your final good-bye. I was frightened by
the seriousness of your death, and even though I could see nothing through the
scream of the dark night wind, I knew a hundred years had passed in that moment.
There is more space for the sun to play upon the ground these days. But even so, the sun caresses the shadows of your trunk as
it makes its passage down the river toward the night. In some strange way you may be lovelier in death. You lie languorous and liquid as if you were
part of some gray river reaching on an unconcerned journey to nowhere.
