Water for Songs

Festival Review, Volume 13, Fall 2022

         My mother has died and it is spring, but my father is an old tree with limbs shrunken from the cold winter of grief. In his prime he was a shade tree, erect and stout and unbending. Now he is a leafless and hairless column of light with water-blue eyes that tell: Suffering has made him kind.

         His suffering has made me raw, as if bark were flayed to show wet wood and beading sap, a forest king undressed and bleeding.

         I cannot cry. Trees are familial, and his dry roots are mine.

         My mother has died.

         My father and I look out the window at flowers and nesting birds. Once he operated machinery. Built cities. But always he was a fisherman’s boy with a soul that flew like a kite. Like a bird. A man in a machine with teeth like a dinosaur’s that expressed both puniness and power. Defying gravity to move stone, then coming home each night to feed the wild finches. His eager hovering children knew what I did not: Reverence requires armor. Trees are movers of water to air with taproots that seek and find. The soil’s water gobblers—the worms, the roots, the burrowing creatures—are like St. Francis’s birds. They know and have always known that my father loves them.

         It is a wordless love, godly perhaps, that asks nothing.

         My mother has died, and still the trees sing. The finches alight, expecting their due, and my father obliges. Each seed he offers has been sorted and the feeders hung with care. The birds are patient twitterers. The chickadees will hide their store and return again for more. “They’re smart,” he says of this commonest of creatures with a knowledge born of watching and of quiet presence. That’s all he has to say, as he stands back to let them feed, for me to understand that to love a creature is to know it.

         She didn’t love birds or trees. She didn’t stand beneath the branches, awed by the cycle of water, light, seed, and song. The necessity of patience to deep listening. His birds were the critters in her dinner time jokes, his love reduced to wars with squirrels.

         Before she died, she was tended by this tree. A taproot of tenderness that bent to her needs. Her cries, her fear. He listened deeply with pained patience. With armored reverence. Knowing that presence does what words cannot do. He loved her as he loves his birds, asking for nothing but the taking of his offering.

         I saw the swatting away of his touch, the lips pressed to refuse his gift of water.

         Can you love a thing you do not know? I wonder.

         “He never says he loves me,” she complained. “Why doesn’t he say the words?”

         The day she learned she was dying, he stayed behind.

         “Other husbands would go,” she said. “But not him. He had to feed his birds.”

         Trees live as families; this I know. I ask my father why he stayed behind.

         The blue eyes fill.

         “I wanted to be alone with my pain,” he said, and later, “I don’t know the words to say how I feel.”

         If you’ve felled a tree, you’ve felt the shiver of the wounding, the splintering wood, and the naked and thundering drop. You’ve felt the pride but also the secret shame at watching a king meet death. Ends remind us, we are mortal. Words fail love and fail as well the bleeding blade of grief.

         My mother has died, loved in her ignorance by a man with a depth inexpressible. Whose hands were perennially grease-stained. Who couldn’t read books. Who sat in a parked truck, alone, weeping at a jazz pianist’s tender “Danny Boy.” No words, just plaintive notes hanging feather-light in air, each one the color of loss. Or of the lifelong griefs that run deep and into which all smaller griefs merge, as if finding their way to the source. Groundwater tapped, drawn up, purified by light, and atomized in the air.

         Perhaps we are made to bear grief, the way trees are made to carry water. And perhaps grief makes us kind, the way drawing water makes trees wise, from Old English wīsian; akin to Old Norse vīsa, to show the way.

         Yes, trees show us the way.

         My mother has died, and my father is showing the way—or his way, which I hope one day will be my way. When I am old and full with loss and grief, may I too be a kind and leafless column of light, a taproot of wisdom offering water for songs.