7000 Oaks

  to the city of Kassel

  and to the memory of Joseph Beuys

Das Chaos einer Nacht

22 October 1943,

cities shrunken into history

at the deadest hour

of the night,

English bombers, storms of fire,

factories billowing,

Flammenmeer.  Soot, bone,

human waste, later

snow and ruin.

In the dark of a cellar

I felt a woman in a fur coat.

The hawks' woods burned,

childhood spiralled to an end.

The archeology of war

spread its footprints into

the mountains of rubble.

Horsecarts, Fleischmarkts,

the shovelling of endless bricks.

Streams of refugees make

for the gates of the city,

fleeing anywhere

as American soldiers come

to occupy, along with stragglers

from Kiev.  Speer's architects

are left to reconstruct

as they see fit, this wasteland

of sewage, iron, and cement.

In 1955, a bear visits

from the Berlin Zoo,

the Rembrandts are restored,

the first art documenta,

the belief in things again.

But not one tree is standing.

Baumschule (Tree Farm)

Our tree truck didn't come,

the sun now high over the pines

of the valley, so I walked

through the rows of sapling oaks,

linden, cherry and birch,

and wrote this poem in my head,

as Mayakovsky always did,

bounding through meadows

or snow-covered steppes,

embellishing himself with

the words, the rhapsody,

scaring off ploughmen and cattle,

rushing home without one phrase

written down, to scrawl

from memory his odes to hope

and homelessness and fury.

I found a love-worn nest

and a redbreast who wanted to talk

with me, and still,

the tree truck didn't come.

Holga sat at the wheel

of the flatbed pickup, humming

to Connie Francis on the radio,

Tu mir nicht weh,

and, Darling, du bist alles,

while in the penitentiary

on the hill, a poet of the RAF

walks in circles in his cell,

scribbling against the watchfulness

as light streams in one window

bent to hell.  On the wall,

pictures of caves and cunts

and birds without wings,

hairy arms and exploding things,

a circle of girls, sketching trees,

trying to sing the sky back in.

The leaf mulch dump beyond,

its sooty fires and raven cries,

and naked Hercules atop the baroque

gardens of the Landgraf Karl,

duck ponds where strangers could

meet and make love in the dark.

Finally, when the men came,

we hauled out the balled roots

already dug from the ground

and we drove the twenty trees

to the streets of the city.

Stadtverwaldung (Planting)

Rain on Dresdnerstrasse, a smog

worse than that of Los Angeles

We had to plant along the Autobahn,

by the Mercedes works and the Holiday Inn.

One basalt rock for every tree,

we laid them out the length of the city.

We dug, cut roots, stamped the earth

around the stones and false acacia.

Three smashed tree trunks,

felled by a drunken driver,

whose grave became their stone.

Turkish sheep in a meadow

(with giant Dumbo ears!),

a field full of ravenous crows

and ripening cabbages

on the first day of frost in December.

Later, trees had to go

to the Theaterplatz, the museum,

by the pile of stones which

prompted all this digging.

Five trees for the parking lot,

each one to be given a name.

The middle one now will grow

for the daughter we do not have,

not yet made into this world.

We walked then to the Fulda River,

to the huge pickax thrown by

Hercules, and to the single

hermitage of the sixties,

the abandoned house of Kassel,

the only one whose yard is full

of weeds in all of Germany,

where a man lives toothless

on welfare, building scarecrows

and tractor parts to pass the time.

Even there was a line of our trees,

the miraculous seven thousand

sprouting up everywhere.

This taking care might insure

a lifetime for our children.

Nature Morte (Still Life)

Up before dawn, we get our trees

and two guys from the prison ward,

drive down to the South End

to plant six trees by lunchtime.

After three days of rain, the earth

was like a pond, and we had to

sling our axes into mud

with each thrust, as Holga spoke

on and on of Perry Rhodan,

outer space adventurer, savior

of the twenty-first century.

But the other men wanted to talk

of the here and now, so happy

to be out at least on Saturdays.

The nature of this gift to the city,

what might the world be like

if all the trees would die.

We sat in the truck at lunch

with breads and wurst and coffee,

as one talked about acid rain,

how all the rabbits were dying.

Feeding the god,  the other one said,

this worship of the oak, pruning

of the golden bough we thought

we knew everything about.

How to save the world, not by Reds

or Greens or SPD bureaucrats,

but all of us just listening.

I heard, saw how much joy they had

to have found this time to share

their chocolates and clementines.

As the rain fell, a woman

scrubbed her porch, and stared

at us as if we were from the moon.

We Germans are good at looking after things,

but beware the taking charge.

And as the prison bus came

to pick them up, we were out again

in orange vests, pounding stakes

for the last tree, so they whistled,

waved, and shouted to me, be sure to

plant a stone and tree for every poem.

Notes:

Seven Thousand Oaks Project  by Joseph Beuys entailed the planting of seven thousand trees between the 7th and 8th Art Documentas.  Flammenmeer,  a sea of flames.  Tu mir nicht weh,

Don't do me no harm.  Darling , du bist alles,  Darling you're everything.

RAF (Rote Armee Faction) ,  the left-wing group of which Baader and Meinhof were members and founders.  SPD , the Socialist Democratic Party of Germany.

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