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Denise Levertov - A Tree Telling Of OrpheusDenise Levertov - A Tree Telling Of Orpheus
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White dawn. Stillness.      When the rippling began     I took it for a sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors     of salt, of treeless horizons. but the white fog didn`t stir; the leaved of my brothers remained outstretched, unmoving.           Yet the rippling drew nearer and then my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips were drying and curling.                   Yet I was not afraid, only                   deeply alert. I was the first to see him, for I grew     out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest. He was a man, it seemed: the two moving stems, the short trunk, the two arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless                               twigs at their ends, and the head that`s crowned by brown or gold grass, bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,   more like a flower`s.                     He carried a burden made of some cut branch bent while it was green, strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this, when he touched it, and from his voice which unlike the wind`s voice had no need of our leaves and branches to complete its sound,                         came the ripple. But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me     as if rain           rose from below and around me     instead of falling. And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:     I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know     what the lark knows; all my sap           was mounting towards the sun that by now               had risen, the mist was rising, the grass was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them deep under earth.         He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:           the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded. Music! there was no twig of me not                         trembling with joy and fear. Then as he sang it was no longer sounds only that made the music: he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language                     came into my roots                         out of the earth,                     into my bark                         out of the air,                     into the pores of my greenest shoots                         gently as dew and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning. He told of journeys,           of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,     of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day deeper than roots… He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,               and I, a tree, understood words ah, it seemed my thick bark would split like a sapling`s that                         grew too fast in the spring when a late frost wounds it.                                  Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames. New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.     As though his lyre (now I knew its name)     were both frost and fire, its chord flamed up to the crown of me.               I was seed again.                     I was fern in the swamp.                         I was coal. And at the heart of my wood (so close I was to becoming man or god)     there was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,           something akin to what men call boredom,                                   something (the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)           that gives to a candle a coldness               in the midst of its burning, he said. It was then,           when in the blaze of his power that                     reached me and changed me           I thought I should fall my length, that the singer began               to leave me.      Slowly           moved from my noon shadow                                   to open light, words leaping and dancing over his shoulders back to me           rivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming slowly again           ripple. And             in terror                     but not in doubt of                                   what I must do in anguish, in haste,               wrenched from the earth root after root, the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder and behind me the others: my brothers forgotten since dawn. In the forest they too had heard, and were pulling their roots in pain out of a thousand year`s layers of dead leaves,     rolling the rocks away,                     breaking themselves                                       out of                                   their depths.          You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,                     of the singing so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,               no wind but the rush of our           branches moving, our trunks breasting the air.                     But the music!                                 The music reached us. Clumsily,     stumbling over our own roots,                             rustling our leaves                                         in answer, we moved, we followed. All day we followed, up hill and down.                               We learned to dance, for he would stop, where the ground was flat,                                   and words he said taught us to leap and to wind in and out around one another    in figures    the lyre`s measure designed. The singer           laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.                                         At sunset we came to this place I stand in, this knoll with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.           In the last light of that day his song became farewell.           He stilled our longing.           He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth, watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet                                         we could almost                               not hear it in the                                   moonless dark. By dawn he was gone.                     We have stood here since, in our new life.               We have waited.                         He does not return. It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost what he sought.               It is said they felled him and cut up his limbs for firewood.                                   And it is said his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing. Perhaps he will not return.                         But what we have lived comes back to us.               We see more.                         We feel, as our rings increase, something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest                                         leaf-tips further.     The wind, the birds,                         do not sound poorer but clearer, recalling our agony, and the way we danced. The music!
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