Laudator Temporis Acti

Jonathan Galassi, Elms, in The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World since 1953 (New York: Picador, 2004), p. 38:

                              to a teacher

Your "yet-to-be-dismantled" elms are few,
and by the time you read this may be gone.
In my own childhood we had one or two
that framed the lawn before the hurricane,
trees that were far too noble to survive
a time like ours, too slender or too sublime.
Something in us wouldn't let them live.

Or was it only that they'd served their time?
"The size of our abidance" wasn't theirs,
the way it can't be yours. That is a trait
of nature, as it is a trait of ours
to see in something passing something great:
our backwardlookingness that makes a tree
the genius of the place it cannot be.

The "teacher" is Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and the quotations come from the closing lines of her Poem, which can be found in Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, and Letters (The Library of America, 2008), pp. 164-166 (at 166):

Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
—the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

Hat tip: Jescie.

Labels: arboricide