Léon Bonvin, Landscape with a Bare Tree and a Plowman, 1864
Pen and brown ink, watercolor, and gum arabic, 18.1 x 16.2 cm
Digital image courtesy of the Getty Open Content Program
A tree extends beyond its needles
and inhabits—fully—its needs. The soil,
sunlight, and long months of misty rain
constituent as the bark, the veins
of sap, the cambium. Wind that pulls
branches to the ground, the people
who prune it, too, comprise the whole
of the tree. Gaze as basic as grain,
nothing exists that isn’t needful
of a context—gun and its recall,
the trunk, the saw, the whirr, the hull
where it traverses its sea, the planed
wood shaped to part water to a lane
fit to pass, ship and tree, one whole,
since not a thing exists that isn’t needful.