Wish You Were Here

Though a postcard is not strictly a letter, they both weigh the same as a hummingbird, and I picture this 70s photo of the cliff walk by night sharp-beaked at the feeder by your garden window, its floodlit wings beating seventy times a second. I’ve read the statistics on wildlife loss and habitat decimation, but though you are surrounded by new-build houses that agents insist on calling homes before the first would-be buyer has even booked an appointment, I trust that your lawn still rolls down to the pure lake, that deer ghost through full moon nights, and that wolfsong soundtracks your gathering of fruit from abundant bushes. I don’t even know if they are native species, but I see you laying out saucers for the badgers and hedgehogs which scuttle to your step, regular as architecture and plump as light. When I open my hands, the card is a blur of ink, love and feathers, trailing every letter I have ever written; and although you are dead and the postage is forty years out of date, I know you will open your window, taste the season’s gradual change, and feel the breeze of wingbeats against your closed eyelids.

The Arboreal Commuter Does His Bit

                                       
In order to save the world, I have scrapped my car and taken to walking to work. It’s ten hours each way, which admittedly is an inconvenience, but it’s given me time to learn the names of trees. I don’t mean the common names, like oak, ash, or elm: I learned these as a small boy, collecting cards from tea packets and sticking them in an album I still have in a box in the attic. And I don’t mean the Latin names, like quercus robur, fraxinus, or ulmus, which I learned during a sad affair with a dendrologist whose voice I sometimes hear on the radio, quoting statistics of which, though precise and clearly articulated for the general listener, I can never quite grasp the full implications for the noise of rushing memories. Rather, I have learned the names the trees give themselves, which human mouths can’t form, and which can’t be expressed in anything so clumsy as a written alphabet. On the other hand, I have had to change my pattern of work, starting and finishing four hours later every day: and I have had to give up sleeping, as there just isn’t time. The trees, of course, have never slept, and commend my decision and what they acknowledge as a commitment to something far greater than myself. They have given me a name, though I can’t pronounce it, but they whisper it and nod when I walk beneath their welcoming shade.