Tall Thin Lines of Alliance

In Viewing Trees I isolate a line by Eavan Boland describing a stand of poplars and the slim commentary suggests how very evocative the line is. Consider now "K219, Adagio" from Jan Zwicky Songs for Relinquishing the Earth whose last lines are disposed as a tercet:

rain's vowelless syntax,
how mathematics was an elegy
the slenderness of trees.

Boland's exquisitely specific "poplars" and Zwicky's most lovely abstraction "slenderness", bring to mind a contrasting view with "Requiem for the Trees" by Robert Gibb where blighted elms are turned "into usable thermals of wood". And itself belongs in the same forest as Tree Destiny.

I'm not suggesting any relationship of influence between these poets or poems. I am intrigued however about how a collection of specimens forms a verbal equivalent of an arboretum or some little copse thick with intertextuality.

And so for day 282
22.09.2007