Field Guide for SawsSycamores are in the way, just as much as oaks and pines. They are indiscriminate about their height and very inconsiderate. They block the hills and the stone veins coursing through the valleys. It is like they’re standing up on the front row at a home town game. Towns become a float, pictured on green plumes of leaves and needles, leaving a view of rooftops and steeples in black and white against the field of green that decorators tend to shun. It’s everywhere as verdant, leafy, olive and citrine. It’s grassy and emerald, even avocado. When they’ve finally run out of shades they simply change the season. Trees smother the land with their seasonal shift from bare to full regalia in the little repetitive shaped umbrellas for lizards, beetles and countless crawling things.
But for poets and the rich landscapers, trees are obnoxious interlopers of what once was a landscape. They inevitably block the sun from a view that figured in a myth or two. It is quite claustrophobic. Artists have given up and stick them in their scenes. Landscapers reveal their arrogance by posing them in a grand display of wealth requiring incessant trimming. Such playthings, so deceitfully passive, hanging moss, mistletoe and kite strings over meadows, fields and streets. They encroach on streams and rivers swallowing the banks in their shadows.
Useful, perhaps, as metaphors for some lost orphan in a rambling novel, or the end of an epic with a shot uphill at the oldest tree around with its leaves drooping over rows of granite headstones. But even rows and rows of the dead are insufficient for the eye to exercise the distance it can see.
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