In the interest of promoting culture, the Regional Transportation District has posted poems in all of the city buses. The poems come from local poets and relate, at least loosely, to buses or transportation.
As I was riding the bus to work this morning (in lieu of a treacherous drive on a slick highway), I looked up at the posters above the windows and saw a high school girl's poem about waiting at a bus stop on a cold autumn day. Her poem's first line was "The trees hovered overhead like skeletons." I fear that the young lady has vaulted over the line separating the vivid from the grotesque. I have never seen trees or skeletons hovering. (If I ever do, I will run into my townhouse and barricade the doors.)
This incident caused me to remember back forty years to a newspaper column by Donald Kaul, a journalist who wrote for the Des Moines Register. Here is what he had to say about another poem about trees, Joyce Kilmer's well-known Trees.
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"I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree"
[What's been said here is that each and every tree on earth is lovelier than every poem. Overlooking the considerable difficulty of comparing the beauty of a poem with that of a tree, the statement ignores the fact that there are a great many ugly trees.]
"A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;"
[Either this tree is all crouched down and bent over or it's standing on its head.]
"A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;"
[Here's this remarkable tree, its mouth pressed to the ground, its eyes rolled back to look at God yet still able to throw up its arms in prayer. It's not a tree, it's a contortionist.]
...
"Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree."
[Which is fine, because if it were the other way round, we'd have some pretty strange looking trees.]
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This was taken from Kaul's 1970 collection of columns called How to Light a Water Heater and Other War Stories. Funny stuff.
