Marilyn Kallet "Moistening Our Roots with Music: Creative Power in Denise Leverton's "A Tree Telling of Orpheus" The sources of power in Denise Leverton's poem "A Tree Tellling of Orpheus" are both ancient and contemporary, obvious and occult. In Leverton's poem, as in oral tradition poetry, language is active, effecting a sense of loss and renewal in the participant/reader. To revitalize an ancient myth is no small task. It would be impossible to narrate Orpheus's journey in a short poem, much less to evoke his famed music, or the spirit of his quest. But underlying and propelling the narrative, the sustained rhythm of Leverton's long poem permits a bodily and imaginative sense of loss and restoration. In its supple lines and precise rhythms, the poem approximates dance. It asks to be read out loud, and read as scored. In doing so, one has the feeling of inhabiting one's voice and body. There are few poems in contemporary literature which evoke this strong sense of physical and imaginative life on the move and in harmony. Leverton's journey to this sustained poem called for hard work, risk and discipline. As a young writer she left England for America to be in the place where creating a new poetics was possible. She apprenticed herself to William Carlos Willimas, visited with him and corresponded with him as his health permitted from 1951 until his death in 1963. Leverton's poem is widely available in her 1970 volume "Relearning the Alphabet". (Excerpted from a much longer manuscript) Reprinted courtesy of the Asheville Poetry Review, Vol. 8, #1, Spring 2001

			Denise Leverton A Tree Telling of Orpheus White dawn. Stillness.      When the rippling began      I took it for a sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors      of salt, of treeless horizons. but the white fog didn't stir; the leaved of my brothers remained outstretched, unmoving.           Yet the rippling drew nearer -- and then my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips were drying and curling.                   Yet I was not afraid, only                   deeply alert. I was the first to see him, for I grew      out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest. He was a man, it seemed: the two moving stems, the short trunk, the two arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless                               twigs at their ends, and the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass, bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,    more like a flower's.                     He carried a burden made of some cut branch bent while it was green, strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this, when he touched it, and from his voice which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our leaves and branches to complete its sound,                          came the ripple. But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me      as if rain           rose from below and around me      instead of falling. And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:      I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know      what the lark knows; all my sap           was mounting towards the sun that by now                had risen, the mist was rising, the grass was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them deep under earth.           He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:           the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded. Music! there was no twig of me not                          trembling with joy and fear. Then as he sang it was no longer sounds only that made the music: he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language                     came into my roots                          out of the earth,                     into my bark                          out of the air,                     into the pores of my greenest shoots                          gently as dew and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning. He told of journeys,           of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,      of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day deeper than roots... He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,                and I, a tree, understood words -- ah, it seemed my thick bark would split like a sapling's that                          grew too fast in the spring when a late frost wounds it.

		Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames. New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.      As though his lyre (now I knew its name)      were both frost and fire, its chord flamed up to the crown of me.                I was seed again.                     I was fern in the swamp.                          I was coal. And at the heart of my wood (so close I was to becoming man or god)      there was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,           something akin to what men call boredom,                                    something (the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)           that gives to a candle a coldness                in the midst of its burning, he said. It was then,           when in the blaze of his power that                     reached me and changed me           I thought I should fall my length, that the singer began                to leave me.      Slowly           moved from my noon shadow                                    to open light, words leaping and dancing over his shoulders back to me           rivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming slowly again           ripple. And I                in terror                     but not in doubt of                                    what I must do in anguish, in haste,                wrenched from the earth root after root, the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder -- and behind me the others: my brothers forgotten since dawn. In the forest they too had heard, and were pulling their roots in pain out of a thousand year's layers of dead leaves,      rolling the rocks away,                     breaking themselves                                       out of                                    their depths.

		You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,                     of the singing so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,                no wind but the rush of our           branches moving, our trunks breasting the air.                     But the music!                                  The music reached us. Clumsily,      stumbling over our own roots,                             rustling our leaves                                         in answer, we moved, we followed. All day we followed, up hill and down.                               We learned to dance, for he would stop, where the ground was flat,                                    and words he said taught us to leap and to wind in and out around one another     in figures     the lyre's measure designed. The singer           laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.                                         At sunset we came to this place I stand in, this knoll with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.           In the last light of that day his song became farewell.           He stilled our longing.           He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth, watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet                                         we could almost                               not hear it in the                                    moonless dark. By dawn he was gone.                     We have stood here since, in our new life.                We have waited.                          He does not return. It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost what he sought.                It is said they felled him and cut up his limbs for firewood.                                    And it is said his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing. Perhaps he will not return.                          But what we have lived comes back to us.                We see more.                          We feel, as our rings increase, something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest                                         leaf-tips further.      The wind, the birds,                          do not sound poorer but clearer, recalling our agony, and the way we danced. The music! copyright 1968 by Denise Leverton Goodman Reprinted courtesy of the Asheville Poetry Review, Vol. 8, #1, Spring 2001

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