Dwellingup, Western Australia
Foresters (said the sign) choose trees
for particular purposes.
A perfect tree, tall, straight,
is taken for construction.
The handrails of the treetop
viewing platform. Its planks.
Its high, deep-planted poles.
The new stumps
of an old cottage. Its rough rafters.
Its window-frames, weatherboards.
So a twisted tree is allowed
to grow, like Zhuangzi said?
Blossoms for singing
honeyeaters, shade
for meditators?
Sometimes (said the sign)
a perfect tree
is left to seed the forest.
A twisted tree might do
for an occasional table,
sanded slice of gnarl or burl
on a tripod of lumpy branches,
or a spinning top,
a candlestick,
a sculpture
of the spirit of the trees.
And a perfect tree, a truly
perfect tree,
might well enfold enough depth
to make a bass guitar,
or encode enough delicate strength
to form
a cello.
“Enfold” alludes to the enfolding of information in the “implicate order” that physicist David Bohm has suggested may underlie the universe. This is discussed in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge 1980, chapter 6, pp. 140–171.