May 18th, 2022 — 5:32am — Lilacs House, Philadelphia
I don’t know how you can stand it. Every moment of every morning, meal, and night is lived in the white, flickering streetlights of I-76 off Greenland Drive. Generations of you grow and die while country-crossing semis thunder by, while guys on neon-green crotch rockets race past Hemmy-revving F-250s bound for Atlantic City. I imagine it’s like living in Isengard. All that progress marching above you.
You belong to a class of fugitives: deer ticks, European hornets, poison ivy, purple loosestrife, Asiatic buttercup, Atlantis trees, robins, jays, weird looking centipedes. Every season, federal road crews come by and kill you all off with carcinogenic chemicals, chainsaws, weed-eaters ran by college interns in the middle of July. By August, you’re right back up in those pancake-leaves of yours, letting nothing else live.
We took you here first. Planted you in the 80s on hillsides, road-cuts, riverbanks. Hoped you’d stop the soil from eroding into the rivers we’d dammed. We didn’t know you’d keep spreading. In all that noise soaked with all those chemicals, you just keep coming back with that hideous urgency of yours. Whatever message you’re sending, we haven’t yet gotten it.
Mistake. Mistake. We made a mistake, yes, taking you here, but you do not seem mistaken. You’re desperate, sure, out-competing the trees we plant on top of you. Sycamores, cottonwoods, willows, red oaks, pins, cherries, all of ’em propped up with nylon string and pumped full of fertilizer to keep their trunks straight and their roots strong. Still, they die or otherwise stagnate. Still, after a heavy rain, this desecrated soil, littered with broken glass and Wawa bags, washes away into the Delaware.
I want sugar maples with limbs the size of trunks. I want to see green-barked sycamores standing on the banks of the Schuylkill, to smell cherry blossoms, to watch the big green fingers of a willow bend in an evening storm. But we don’t know how to get rid of you.
I don’t know how to stop the thoughts that spring up, like you, in early, wet March, out-competing native, warm-weathered, well-mannered trees. My mind is a pistol-grip sprayer loaded with glyphosate and yet the more I spray the taller they tower next season, over all the meditation practices and stupid diets I abandon after the second week anyway. The morning I over-till is the day you sprout. Given the chance, you take me right back to where I started.
Still. I wouldn’t trade even the biggest sycamore planted in the greenest lawn of Strawberry Mansion if it meant I couldn’t hear what you have to say. You brought me here, you cry. Needed me to fix your shit soil. Your knives are dull and useless. The trees you plant, romantic and contrived. You missed the point, you yell out, while we plant tulips in broken glass below the highway. Missed the whole fucking thing.
