the deepening ground

Tonight, in the search for my copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, serendipity led me to my copy of Philip Terman’s Our Portion: New and Selected Poems published in 2015. Sometimes we forget the gifts we have sitting on our shelves or within miles of our home. Years ago, I invited Philip Terman to speak to my poetry class and even bought his piano that currently sits in our music room. I still remember carefully moving it from his beautiful home in the country to my house in town. Since then, we’ve crossed paths occasionally, most recently at my colleague’s pottery show where I shared a poem I wrote about the process of wood fired pottery. Thumbing my way through the poems from the back of the book, I came across this piece that I believe Terman shared in my class when he visited. It reminded me of my mother-in-law’s home in Bath, New York, and the tree in the front yard from which we used to swing until it, too, had to be cut down. And now that my mother-in-law lives with us, Bath itself has become an absence that I love more now in its loss. For all of us who have learned that “Death is a way of allowing [one] to see,” come sit in the warmth of this deepening ground for awhile.

The Absence That Was the Tree by Philip Terman

Two men are cutting the dead tree down,
limbs and branches first, then the trunk
in sections, all the pieces scattered in piles
on the ground out of which it grew.

It's been released from its enormous weight.
It's given us this gift of a new view —
now the hidden church and the woods
across the road can stare back at us

through where it stood and labored hard
to guard our privacy. The regions
of sky the branches divided have merged
back again into their indistinct whole.

All the nests have come crashing down.
No longer will we hear birdsong
from that particular quarter: it will not
serve as orientation or point of discussion.

We remark about the extra light,
the new distance its absence
will afford, the extra breezes
traveling through the opened gate.

Death is a way of allowing us to see
beyond where the body formally stood.
But we have come to love the body
more than the space revealed behind it.

All winter long we'll hack the remnants
even smaller so they'll fit our stove,
warming us in its next life. When
it says farewell, it will be as smoke on the air.

“The Absence That Was the Tree” (2015) by Philip Terman from Our Portion: New and Selected Poems © Autumn House, 2015: 207-208.