7000 Oaks
Das Chaos einer Nacht
22 October 1943,
cities shrunken into history
at the dead-most 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 spiraled to an end.
The archeology of war
spread its footprints into
the mountains of rubble.
Horse carts, Fleischmarkts,
the shoveling 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,
a 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 pines
of the valley, so I walked
through rows of sapling oaks,
linden, cherry and birch and
wrote this poem in my head,
as Mayakovsky always did,
bounding through meadows
or on snow-covered steppes,
embellishing himself with
the words, the rhapsody,
scaring off plowmen, cattle,
rushing home without words
written down, so to scrawl
from memory his odes to hope
and homelessness and fury.
I found a love-worn nest
and a robin who prattled
on with me, and still,
the tree truck didn't come.
Holger sat at the wheel
of a pickup, humming to
Connie Francis on a radio,
Tu mir nicht weh,
and, Darling, du bist alles,
while in a penitentiary
on the hill, a poet of the RAF
walks in circles in his cell,
scribbling for his dinner,
as light streams in a window
bent to hell. On his wall,
pictures of caves and crows
and lizards without wings,
hairy arms, exploding things.
A circle of girls, sketching trees.
try to sing some sky back in.
The leaf mulch dump beyond,
its sooty fires and raven cries,
and Hercules, up in a baroque
garden of the Landgraf Karl,
ponds where strangers might
meet and make love in the dark.
Finally, when the tree men came,
we lift up the balled-up roots
already dug from the ground
and we drove the twenty trees
downtown to a central station.
Stadtverwaldung (City Planting)
We planted along the Autobahn,
by Mercedes and the Holiday Inn.
One basalt rock for every tree, we
laid them out the length of the city.
We dug, cut roots, stamped 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 of ravenous crows
and ripening red cabbages
on the first day of December.
Later, more 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 don’t have,
not yet made into this world.
We walked to the Fulda River,
to the huge pickax thrown by
Hercules, and to the single
hermitage left of the sixties,
and an abandoned farmhouse,
the only one whose yard is full
of weeds in all of Germany,
where a man lives toothless
on welfare, building scarecrows
or tractor parts to pass the time:
even there we saw our trees,
a miraculous seven thousand
lining each and every street.
This taking care might insure
a lifetime for our children.
Still Life
Up before dawn, we get our trees
and two guys from the prison,
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 Holger spoke
on and on of Perry Rhodan,
outer space adventurer, savior
of the twenty-first century.
But the men wanted to talk
of the here and now, so happy
to be out at least on Saturdays.
The nature of a gift to the city,
what might the world be like
without these rocks and trees.
We lounged in the truck at lunch
with breads and wurst and coffee,
as someone talked about acid rain,
how all the rabbits were dying.
Feeding the god, another 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.