The Hardy Tree

Abstract

The Hardy Tree Linda Bierds (bio) with lines by Thomas Hardy and Alan Turing 1941 An ancient pulse, the young man thought—germ and birth, germ and birth—then shut the door on the clicking Bombes, their rhythmic search for words within a cryptogram, and rode away. From Bletchley Park to London. Just for an evening, two hours or three. Just for the time it took to spiral down from war to . . . what? Beyond his train, the late-blue, lately-fractured sky quivered. Thin smoke without flame rose from the couch-grass. Everywhere a brokenness—that this late day of thought, and pact, and code still failed to mend. Because the poet had stood in the churchyard and watched, by flarelamps, the graves unearthed, watched each night the unclaimed bodies packed away, the graveyard cinch and cinch its boundaries so—why?—so trains might pass; because the poet had scanned the sky, the belfries and steeples, dark against a paler dark; because he had heard a fox bark, sonorous and long— three barks, horn-like but melancholy, the young man wanted the same churchyard, the same gradually darkening, quiet sky. Along the railroad berm, sparse clumps of heather twitched and stilled. Twitched and stilled. [End Page 9] Gritty semaphores. Then he stood in the churchyard where Hardy once stood. There was the ash tree, and there—in memoriam perhaps?— the upright headstones placed in rings around its trunk. Just three or four evenly spaced, concentric rings. But no, that was eighty years ago. Now the ash tree’s roots had nudged the rings into a jumbled cluster, had tipped, in little groups of two and three, some stones together. One and one and two and three. Is that a code? Nature’s logarithmic shrug? 1931 Matter is meaningless, he wrote at eighteen, in the absence of spirit. Then something about the body and death. In the deal sheen of public school classrooms, everyone wrote of the body and death. Everyone heard the syllables slide from leaves to war to vacancy, and touched the words and spoke the sounds and saw the oxen kneel. No brittle ciphers yet. Just fluid mystery. 1941 Leaves: serrated. Last to open—he had read this somewhere—first to fall. Blossoms: petal-less. And the dark trunk, eighty years in the ground: fissured vertically. The seeds are weights on weightless wings, oval, embedded, forward-thrust— the whole so unbalanced it spirals down. The wholes are “keys”—but why? Because they click? Because their spinning-jenny whirl-a-gigs, between pure flight and gravity, unlock a little fuse? [End Page 10] Almost evening. Everywhere a brokenness—and yet London seemed held by the strangest silence, like—what were the lines?—like the belfry loft when the tenor after tolling stops its hum. A few lights began in the windows. A few blackout curtains closed. And do we progress, as Hardy wondered, not in a straight line but a looped orbit, half doomed to the past as we wheel forward? There, just above him, was the ash tree. There, at his feet, the dust of the lark that Shelley heard. 1920 Mother, very new boys here must run through the paddles. I have tried to predict their rhythm and will dodge accordingly. 1941 Had he slept a bit? His own words circling up from deep in his childhood? A fountain pen, Mother, of my own invention a typewriter of my own invention slide along to the round A press down Then a stirring began in the ash tree, just under the keys. Finches perhaps? Or nightingales? Thrush? And over the churchyard came the thrum of engines in the black cars and the long horn—he loved the sound— of an inbound train crossing the field behind him. Was it higher than the ash? That stirring? Some dark shape shifting in from the Channel? But no, it was birds in the limbs. Nightingales—slide along—finches, thrush. Young birds—to the round—young birds that just a year ago were not birds at all, but only particles of grain, and earth, and air, and rain. [End Page 11] Linda Bierds Linda Bierds’s ninth book of poetry, Roget’s...