Are Trees Anonymous?
You discover an autograph on a tree.
You know it’s not the tree’s –
it has no commitment to history.
Only strangers leave their names on bark.
That signature is a tease, a trace – ‘I was here’.
(Which tree has ever needed to say that?)
Everyone else is self-important,
everyone except madmen and lovers.
This they share with trees, these sky-holding people –
a flattened anonymity.
It is always a surprise, the history of anonymity.
You look at the trees, their indifference to recognition,
and you begin to see the path of evolution –
the mammal’s backbone needs fame. The tree trunk none.
You’ve seen it behave like a time bomb,
you’ve seen ‘Anonymous’ become the name of a race.
Later, when you realise that tree leaves calibrate wind speed,
you discover that anonymity also has genres.
You sit under a tree and sneeze,
and you wonder which one is more anonymous –
the tree or the sneeze.
How to Console a Dying Plant
What we actually mourn is our turning to meat.
So you must never take a mirror to the dying.
For reflecting surfaces can’t hold the fading of flesh.
Or even fatigue whose destiny is to never be in anyone’s earshot.
The props you know are of little use.
What use are the Scriptures or the drumbeat of last wishes to a plant?
Or a hand and its show of genres – patting, holding, and then leaving?
You touch the stem from time to time, your fingers a stethoscope.
You know so little. Between your heart and head is a bed.
You fall in love often. Every day the bed turns a little more into a coffin.
Every day the plant turns a little more into an aged radio –
It will lose signal soon.
Blood, stillness, the stop of the nostril fan – these you’ve known as death.
But this is a foreign language: the loss of leaves, the softness of hard stem,
the collapse of the dignified vertical into the battle-lost horizontal.
And the worst – the complete rejection of water.
As if it was poison, or an unfamiliar dialect.
Death is so prolific; the death of plants a permanent epidemic.
How do you console those who do not know the fear of uncertainty?
You look for an aperture, something like an ear,
so that your words can enter the tree like an insect.
You fail, and you wonder whether insects are better consolers.
You think of things to say: the afterlife, cremation,
the crowded energies of a funeral, photographs in an album.
You stammer – what use are these to plants, to anyone?
You want to make promises about looking after its family –
swift death certificates and life insurance policies.
Instead, you look at the withering trunk
and think of how a tree has no ‘spare parts’, no ‘organ transplants’.
Death is a tussle between law and justice.
This tree’s known neither, nothing except standing.
You can’t console, you can’t tidy life’s vanity.
For the tree, death is only an impurity.
V.I.P. (Very Important Plant)
You have asked this once already – why no child is ever a V.I.P.
You remember when it first came to you, this question –
when you were looking at saplings in a nursery.
Now it circulates again, like a degenerate cloud, when they report:
“Officials in India want to make one thing clear:
the tree that President Barack Obama planted in New Delhi three weeks ago is not dead.
It just looks dead.”
A dog rushes out of you when you read it.
Is the tree a teenager, they who think of themselves as V.I.P.s?
The worry warts don’t end there:
Obama planted a peepul tree at a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi.
“By Thursday, though, it was just a single lonely stem.
Its lack of leaves has been giving Indian officials sleepless nights,
with the media in India criticising them for allowing the tree to die
less than a month after the presidential visit.”
It’s as if the dying tree is a smokescreen,
or a diplomat opposing foreign policy, a new beat.
This tree, suddenly V.I.P., etiolates a new folklore.
Everyone was once born a stranger. Importance was such profligate art.
The Obama tree is dying from this accident, this postpartum depression
of being a mimic celebrity, from being a stranger to importance.
I could plant a Weeping Fig in its stead. But even the imagination gets injured.
Fame is such a waste. It can’t even be recycled.
Grass
‘Egalitarian’ is not a poetic word
until you benefit from its footprint.
You’ve imagined this of grass,
you cannot say why.
Even merit needs a shoulder.
Grass has none.
Obedience is laziness.
You’ve come to expect both from grass.
It annoys you, the colour blindness of grass,
its indifference to wooing the eye,
its lack of sexual energy.
You lay yourself on it but it is no woman –
there is no exchange of wetness.
Instead, winter dust asks for entry.
You sit up and suddenly there’s an invasion:
Sleep fights with rock salt thoughts, a lover’s quarrel.
You touch it again, this grass, its resolute chains.
The sharpness pricks your fingers like infant teeth.
But it is passion you seek, even if violence it be.
You think of grass as human – why else their secretive lovemaking?
The sex life of parents, beggars and street dwellers
are slippery stones in your imagination. Grass is them.
Sound is indiscipline amplified to life.
You want to hear the hunger inside grass,
like your stomach’s growling.
But there is no sound, none except its elasticity –
its tearing, like a bow kicking its launching string.
The heat arrives, it melts stones, roads and fat.
The earth, its host and home, scalds grass.
Blisters of yellow, ropes of stale fire, earth as ashtray.
Departure also demands craftsmanship.
And so the sameness of grass, its commune,
one worker grass blade replacing another;
like breath, undifferentiated.
Grass is always middle-aged. Like your desire.
Here, lying on it, at the eye level of crawling ants,
you are miraculously restored as grass –
And you become the difference between ‘together’ and ‘altogether’.
Sumana Roy’s first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was published in India in February 2017. Her poems have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Drunken Boat, The Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She lives in Siliguri in India.