D E C E M B E R 1 9 9 7 ![]() GIRDLINGby Robert Morgan | |||||||||||||
![]() (For help, see a note about the audio.) Also by Robert Morgan: Wind From a Waterfall (1999) The Grain of Sound (1999) Option (1997) Go to: An Audible Anthology Poetry Pages |
Quicker than the felling of trees, a single ringing of the bark above ground opened a wild grove the first summer of settlement. As buds dried up, the sap stream cut, sun touched virgin forest floor. Corn planted in hills not rows stretched faster than briars or weeds. Feeding on centuries of leafmold the stalks reached up among the dying limbs before tasseling. By Dog Days the girdled acres brimmed with corn and nettles, honeysuckle vines. By the next spring rotting twig ends and little branches peppered down on the plowed ground. And by the third year whole sheaths of bark dropped like shields of a defeated army on the hearth of cultivation. In five years the standing trunks looked like stones and statues in a graveyard as crops rose and fell with the seasons. In a decade the woods were gone. Robert Morgan is a professor of English at Cornell University and the author of several books, including Green River: New and Selected Poems (1991) and The Truest Pleasure (1995), a novel. Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; December 1997; Girdling; Volume 280, No. 6; page 76. |
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