Scaffold Tree

Scaffold Tree

From a dream photograph that might have been taken by A.L.Kroeber

The pages of the talking book are thick

and floury to the touch. Blades of shadow

in the old black-and-white plates cut

Klamath landscapes into sourbread slices.

The tree in the photo that draws me

spreads stocky bare limbs from a headland.

Dark eagles roost, row on row.

Two women perch among them, second row

on the right. Can this be a group portrait?

The tree stands like a scaffold.

I must know more. I lean into the picture

and find it is an open window.

Leaning through, I see the tree has no roots;

strong native men hold it in place,

tensing their muscles against the wind

that wants to sweep it out across the bay.

Everything has been prepared by man’s –

or woman’s – intention. Birds and women

perch on cross-boughs tied together.

Early ethnographers, Teutonic ladies

of military mien, stand bespectacled watch

but will not speak to the interloper at the window.

I turn back to the book for help.

On the facing page is a Farewell Song.

The book sings utterly foreign words to me

full of long Es, full of keening,

and counsels me never to confuse

a terminal N with a final M.

I think this would be a sweet way to go:

to leave the body in the scaffold tree

to be picked clean by fastidious carrion birds.

Better than moldering in the earth

or viler still, in an airtight cask above it.

I will have my body burned to white ash

when my spirit is done with it

because scaffold trees are problematic

in places with health codes and too many people.

Yet in my heart I would like to fly off

with the sea-going eagles, rising into beauty.

Comment: This poem is in my collection, Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories, published by Excelsion Editions/State University of New York Press. I am inspired to post it today because of discussion of the influence on Ursula LeGuin of her anthropologist father, A.L.Kroeber, who is mentioned here.

Graphic: Tree burial of the Oglala Sioux near Fort Laramie, Wyoming. American Indian Select List number 18, US Government Archives.