Place 9: Bones

Tuesday November 3, 2009 9:34 am

Many trees are bare-branched today and crispy brown leaves coat the ground. Intricate patterns of trunks and branches appear black against the bright late-morning sky, strewn with motionless clouds. The slant and intensity of the sunlight are undeniably wintery. Against the vibrant blue background of sky, I follow the curves of trunks and branches, imagining in time-lapse progression how they might have grown up from saplings. Now that most of the leaves are gone, my eyes are drawn to the color and texture of the different kinds of bark, some marbled green with lichens. The bare trees remind me of blood vessels, the vena cava of the trunk branching into venule-like limbs and ending in tiny capillaries.

The cemetery is beautiful today, a different type of beauty. Since many of the leaves are fallen, my eye has time to rest between flashes of color. Somehow I appreciate it more when my gaze lands on a yellow and red star maple still in leaf, or notices delicate gray seed pods or bright red berries at the ends of bare limbs. Some trees have just a few leaves left at the ends of their branches and they look to me like lights at the end of a string.

Crows caw loudly from time to time and smaller chirps fill in the quiet intermittently. I learned recently that many local bird species, including some crows and blue jays, don't fly south for the winter. I'm glad they'll be around to punctuate the cold with their songs. I feel the cold in my nose and throat and especially my ears – I can sense the contours of my ear canals from the shape of the cold air inside.

On the way to the clearing I see three Japanese maples planted together. Last week they were deep crimson purple and breathtaking but this week they are totally bare. All at once they lost their leaves and now they cover ground underneath like a pool. The leaves on the ground look like blood running out of the trees, beautiful blood. I wish humans left something beautiful behind like that. The human corpse doesn’t seem very beautiful; maybe that’s why we bury it. But then again who knows how the trees view our corpses. Maybe our corpses seem beautiful to them.

Now that many of the leaves have fallen, I can see the clearing through the thicket as I approach. In the summer this view was totally hidden. The change reminds me of the way curtains in back of a play’s set turn translucent at the end of a scene, just before they lift away. As I enter the clearing I see that its floor is covered in leaves and I feel relieved that the tire-torn landscape is hidden.

Around the perimeter of the clearing, the Japanese knotweed has lost its leaves and turned reddish-brown. It looks like a fence made of long rusty nails welded together. Although the leaves behind the knotweed have thinned, the clearing doesn’t feel as open or exposed as I thought it would.

I can’t believe that the trees near the gate are the same ones that seemed so fully dominated by vines several weeks ago. The canopy of one of the trees - I thought it was an oak but now I'm not sure - is in full leaf, green like the first green of spring. It is as if the tree has begun a second life since the vines relaxed their hold. The only sign of the vines, for now, are clutches of naked woody stems. They don't even show up in the pictures.

I’m becoming more interested in what’s down the hillside at the bottom of the ravine – I can see so much more of it now than before. It's dizzying to stand here, looking down. Without the leaves, I see birds alighting in the trees. When I first started coming here I rarely saw a bird, only heard them. Next week I will bring binoculars to try to identify some of them. I don’t know anything about bird watching but it seems like this would be a good season for it. So far this season I’ve seen wild turkeys, crows, geese, blue jays, sparrows and others I can’t identify. I’ve noticed that once I learn to identify a plant or animal I suddenly see it everywhere. Blue jays are easy to spot and they are active today in the clearing. I’ve seen five or six fly overhead since I arrived, moving from one tree to another. Now two jays come to rest in the upper branches of the smooth, white tree that rises from the center of the ravine, long dead.

Through all of the changes from week to week, this one dead tree has remained constant. I’ve wanted to identify it but I don’t know how; it lacks the conventional markers like leaves, twigs and fruit. Even the bark is all but stripped away. The task of identifying this tree might be something like skeletal analysis – deducing gender from the angle of a femur, strength from the size of muscle attachment points, intelligence from cranial capacity. How elegant the death of this tree: to leave behind its graceful body, still standing upright; its beautiful bones swept clean by the wind.