On this second Friday of summer, I'm still reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers, and while perhaps that first ecstatic response has cooled, I'm still enjoying it quite a bit. I'm about one hundred pages in. At this point, the novel feels like instruments in a symphony warming up. I don't feel like saying much about it at this point, so I give you a lovely tree-ish poem instead:

In the Tree House at Night

by James Dickey

And now the green household is dark.   

The half-moon completely is shining   

On the earth-lighted tops of the trees.   

To be dead, a house must be still.

The floor and the walls wave me slowly;   

I am deep in them over my head.   

The needles and pine cones about me

Are full of small birds at their roundest,   

Their fists without mercy gripping

Hard down through the tree to the roots   

To sing back at light when they feel it.   

We lie here like angels in bodies,

My brothers and I, one dead,

The other asleep from much living,

In mid-air huddled beside me.

Dark climbed to us here as we climbed

Up the nails I have hammered all day

Through the sprained, comic rungs of the ladder   

Of broom handles, crate slats, and laths

Foot by foot up the trunk to the branches   

Where we came out at last over lakes

Of leaves, of fields disencumbered of earth   

That move with the moves of the spirit.   

Each nail that sustains us I set here;

Each nail in the house is now steadied

By my dead brother’s huge, freckled hand.   

Through the years, he has pointed his hammer   

Up into these limbs, and told us

That we must ascend, and all lie here.   

Step after step he has brought me,   

Embracing the trunk as his body,

Shaking its limbs with my heartbeat,   

Till the pine cones danced without wind   

And fell from the branches like apples.   

In the arm-slender forks of our dwelling

I breathe my live brother’s light hair.   

The blanket around us becomes

As solid as stone, and it sways.

With all my heart, I close

The blue, timeless eye of my mind.   

Wind springs, as my dead brother smiles   

And touches the tree at the root;

A shudder of joy runs up

The trunk; the needles tingle;   

One bird uncontrollably cries.

The wind changes round, and I stir   

Within another’s life. Whose life?

Who is dead? Whose presence is living?   

When may I fall strangely to earth,

Who am nailed to this branch by a spirit?   

Can two bodies make up a third?

To sing, must I feel the world’s light?   

My green, graceful bones fill the air   

With sleeping birds. Alone, alone

And with them I move gently.

I move at the heart of the world.