In the fall of 2019, I was at a The Lit Youngstown Literary Conference in Youngstown, Ohio (amazing how
long ago that seems now) when I heard Philip Metres read his poem, “One Tree” from his wonderful new book, Shrapnel Maps. And like many poems that are also parables, the poem stuck with me. And stuck with me. And stuck with me.
When I first heard it, I thought I knew exactly what it meant. I could see it unfolding in my mind. After all, it seems like a simple story, and a true one. I know the neighborhood where the poet lives, and his wife, Amy Breau, a fabulous poet in her own right. I smiled, picturing her, rushing outside with her hair on fire, screaming, “NO!” as the man began chainsawing a limb from her sacred tree, while Philip, the consummate peacemaker, stayed inside, wishing he could hide. But in the end, when the chainsaw was lowered into the tree, I thought, Phil! You let them cut her tree? Because “someone must give”?
I was particularly irked by his apologies to the neighbor, his repeated claim, “it’s not me,” when it was, too, him. After all, “we” said no in the third sentence, not she. What a coward! I thought.
The poem triggered memories of my own family where my mother fought and lost many local, environmental battles. This was back in the 60’s when sexism was even more alive and well than it is today, and my father was so horrified by her activism, he asked that the local newspaper use her maiden name when they wrote about her. He didn’t want the businessmen in town to know that she was his wife. I sometimes wondered—if he had stood by her side, would she have been more successful? After all, people listened to men back then. Not to women.
As I was driving home to Virginia after the conference, a line kept repeating in my head: “Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love.” I began contemplating the poem as a parable of the one tree—or the sacred tree of life. What will or won’t we do to defend it? I loved how he compared the tree to the baby brought to Solomon. It makes a lovely environmental parable. Or so I thought.
But then, this winter Philip Metres sent me a video of another tree poem, "Olive Tree" for a project called Lit by the Imaginationthat I am working on for LitYoungstown (we are asking poets to read a poem and offer a prompt based on the poem. These short videos will be posted in April on the LitYoungstown Facebook page). I thought of the olive tree, and the term—offering an olive branch. And of the closing words in the poem, “first brambles, then olives.” Written at his brother-in-law’s home in Palestine, the poem reminded me of Metres’ faith, hope for, and interest in peace and conflict resolution, especially in the Middle East. And suddenly I realized I had misunderstood the first tree poem. Somehow I had fallen so in love with the image of the wife, the glorious, fiery wife with her passion and vision so clear, I had not paid attention to what the poet intended.
The speaker of the poem isn’t championing his wife or the tree. Instead he’s pondering the question of what one should do if he sees both sides of a conflict. “Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade?” he asks. The tree is not the tree of life, but a tulip poplar, one of the fastest growing native trees of the eastern United States, and a tree that grows so wide, the Native Americans used to make canoes from their trunks. Like the wife in the poem, I had tulip trees in my yard as a child, and they grew to be over 90 feet tall in a relatively short time. In the end the poem, when “they lower the chainsaw again,” I suppose they are putting the chainsaw down on the ground, not raising it to the tree. And the speaker is apologizing, “Dear neighbor it’s not me,” as he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of his hot-headed wife. The poem is not an ecological parable but a political parable about neighborly love, or the lack thereof.
Now, when I reread the poem, I wonder at how often we blame the hot-headed, unappeasable women of the world. Is that a word, unappeasable? I am picturing them now, whole tribes of unappeasable, rising up as one. Needless to say, I still vote for the wife.
Philip Metres has written numerous books, including Shrapnel Maps, Sand Opera, and The Sound of Listening. Awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations, and three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.
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