Suzanne Noguere
August 2002

Elm


                           I

Elm: the elemental word whose root
means nothing but itself like mother, sun,
heart, one, the unanalyzable lm–
that speciated in the tongues of Europe
and lodged in the colonists' minds
to cross the ocean in a boat.

Elm! They knew that leaf: unequal at
the base like the two sides of any question
and each one doubly toothed. But not wych elm
and not the English. Never had they seen
an elm as elegant as this that towered
and flared into a vase-shaped crown that seemed
to hold a flock of birds like flowers.

Kaõkæ:? So the Iroquois
called the tree, one word for their six tongues,
one unanalyzable root that proved
the tree was central to their life. They knew
its moods. They knew its willingness in spring
to yield its outer bark to knife and wedge
as if it were a cloak too warm to wear.
They peeled the bark and left the tree to heal,
bearing the bark back sheet by sheet to sew
onto the longhouse frame. What was their League
itself but a longhouse with six fires
stretching from the Hudson to the Genesee?
And who were they to themselves but
the Hau de no sau nee, "People of the Long House,"
who gave thanks to the Creator, thanks to
the earth, the sun, the streams, thanks to the trees.

Red man and white, friends on a land still forest,
tangled together for one hundred years.
But who now were the English to themselves?
Loyalist or Patriot, Tory or Whig—
words seared the air like bullets
and caught the Iroquois in the cross-fire
of an ire they did not understand.
Like the mid-vein of a leaf, straight and strong,
neutral between both sides, beseeched, they said
for one year, two, "Brother, we love you both."
But as sap oozes out when a leaf is torn,
so the blood flowed from their veins too, blood
the color of skin, brother against brother,
the League split open by the hatchet of hate,
two nations to the rebels, four to the British,
red and white intermingled on both sides
and everywhere the cornfields burning and
the houses going up in flames.
                                             Peace brought
white settlers streaming west until
the Iroquois were hemmed in on reservations,
and where the settlers came they cleared the land,
cleared the land and planted the elm, the vaulting elm
that made Main Street a cathedral aisle.


                           II

Ceratocystis ulmi: the fungus spread
by elm bark beetles as they flew from tree
to tree through Europe after World War I
with the spores stuck like pollen on their backs,
feeding and breeding in bark along a route
of devastation for ten years before
they lodged in the logs meant for veneer
and crossed the ocean in a boat.

Ceratocystis ulmi: certain death,
the causal agent of Dutch elm disease,
specks on the beetles as they breach the bark,
specks that are spores, spores that bud into more
and flow in the sap stream throughout the tree
and spread their threads along the vessel walls,
tangled and toxic, then breed into more
until at last the tree fights back to block
their way with growths jutting into the stream,
with gums clogging its own lifeline to the leaves.
Without water the leaves turn yellow, and
wilt follows. Branch by branch and year by year
the thirst worsens and still the tree stands, rooted
like a people to their ancestral land.

Elm, the American elm, the skeleton elm
standing by roadsides in the rigor of death,
surviving in pockets like the Iroquois
in a stubborn otherness not skin deep
or in the elm all told in a vase shape
but reaching deeper into every cell
to the double sum of its chromosomes,
twice that of every other elm on earth.
Now spring comes and we scout the trees for wilt.
We strip the bark to look for discolored wood.
With saws and shovels, fungicides and pheromones
we take to the field; and in the lab, creative
in crisis, we wait out new ways to breed
resistance into what will not cross, trying
by hook or crook, by wile or will,
to save something of what we mean by native.

FromWhirling Round the Sun, Midmarch Arts Press, 1996.