Cottonwood

The huge one at meadow’s edge,
Overhanging Handspan Creek,
Lights up in the early morning
And shadows the late afternoon.

It’s been throwing cotton this week,
Fluffy fistfuls of the stuff, drifting
In light flurries on small breezes,
Sifting like white dust into the grass.

You don’t need to be Linnaeus
To know what all this is for, the floating
Pollen and powder of reproduction,
The allergenic sex of the great trees.

You also don’t need to humanize it
Too much, the strategies, the lust
To go on living, the fables of competition
And sociable multispecies cooperation

That make us happy to imagine,
Make us sad. It’s alive. It’s like us
Like that, like everything alive is alike.
Otherwise, it’s something else.

On this continent, the cottonwoods
Grow widespread and magnificent.
You can catch their flurries in urban lots
Or along the shores of a remote lake,

In ranch country along the Colorado,
In the narrow valleys of British Columbia.
But let’s not talk about success just yet.
Edward Abbey could go on and on

About his love of desert cottonwoods.
There’s a poem, somewhere, where someone
Actually proposes, half seriously, to worship
One. So what is it? What is it about this one?

There’s a ring of them around the meadow,
Outlining where the creek and irrigation
Ditch fork inside the barbed wire fencing
This morning’s frisky calves and cows.

That whole ring of cottonwoods is thriving,
Most of them huge. I’ll tell you what it is.
This biggest one’s convenient. It’s never
The success we think it is, this kind of thing,

Whatever inspires us to admiration or hymns.
It’s coincidence, in cottonwoods as in
All things. Something in us refuses this
Because we crave significance. But it is.