TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I like to think that I’m still growing as a person. That every year I become older, I truly grow older, developing some new part of myself. Conversations about aging so often dwell on preserving what you have when you’re young, about postponing loss. But when I turn to my writing, my poems and prose, I see a body of work that does continue to grow. A body that comes from my physical body, from how my whole being senses and processes the world around me. It continues to grow, even when marked by hardship, by absences, and by loss.

This reminds me that not all living things grow in the same way. Trees grow their newest matter on the outermost layer, just underneath the bark, year after year. Their rings tell us how old they are. Scientists who study dendrochronology, or the growth of tree rings, can tell if a tree has lived through everything from a flood, insect attack, lightning strike, or earthquake just by looking at its rings. Experts in dendroclimatology can even reconstruct past climates and environmental conditions by analyzing tree rings.

Through science, we have the ability to learn not just about the tree itself, but about the environment it lived in. About the things it experienced — and survived — over the course of its life. We can only discover them once a tree is felled, but every single tree carries this information, this way for us to recreate the narrative of the environment it grew in.

The histories that trees hold, and the secrets revealed by their rings, are at the heart of today’s poem.

Dialogue with the Oldest Tree in the U.S., whose Location is a Closely-Guarded Forest Service Secret
by Nina Sudhakar

stilted woodlands / towering reliquaries
give me more than a whisper passed down
from the heavens / I wish to hear it arise
from the greened inlet of your mouth
& every worshipper gathered incredulous
amongst the woven roots wreathed
in shattered sunlight imagines
the tendrils caressing an open palm
applying a faint pressure reminiscent
of an arriving epiphany / a misplayed chord
in a masterpiece / a droplet signalling rain
an end to drought / the beginning of a flood
& no way to tell the difference —

the swallows prattle on at dusk / shattering
the silence with a story told a thousand times
only I know its origin / the names that were
changed / I am still alive & atoning for a sin
I never witnessed / & sure this world will soften
you up            / the ridges redolent of so many hard edges
a mountain range forged from continents that
could not help but touch / & yes you might long
for sleep / to be dispossessed of your body
to forget that every building erects a foundation
for future rubble / if you run the chaff of my living
through somnolence's sieve & stand in the remains
a patch of safe moonlight / for even the stars
throw down beams that have been seen
somewhere in the universe / your every future
will always be       just glimpsed / yet denied by
concentric circles mapping a slow route
to the present where (still) (here) I stand

“Dialogue with the Oldest Tree in the U.S., whose Location is a Closely-Guarded Forest Service Secret” by Nina Sudhakar. Used by permission of the poet.