“My Friend Tells Me that Trees are Talking to Each Other” by Stacy Little
And, for a moment, I really hate him for saying it.
My friend tells me that the scientists these days say that
trees are talking to each other
in the same way a yoga teacher told me we're all made of stardust
or a young man told me taking DMT made him realize we're all connected—
and then he didn't tip the waitress.
You meet these kinds of people
the ones who are made of stardust
if you write poetry like this, poetry which is about people
who are made of carbon, wood shavings and bird shit,
sugar and spice and Splenda packets
and other sorts of things bodies are made of these days—
scientists these days say that
we all have about a plastic spoon's worth of microplastics
in each of our brains.
The stardust people tell me they don't much like that
as the subject of a poem.
The stardust people like talking about sunsets, and trees,
and early Neruda poems about pretty women and cherry blossoms
bursting into bouquets at the advent of spring.
They don't much like what happened later
when Neruda began to write poems about the Fascists in Spain
slaughtering villages and burning thousands of people
back into stardust.
And they probably don't care for poetry
about whether or not Neruda was murdered
by the CIA-backed Pinochet regime
on the sun-drenched coast of Chile in late summer.
They're going to ask: where are the poems about trees?
So I tell my friend
what I know
about the semiotics of trees—
that it's not just the trees, but also weeds and flowers
and tomato plants and underground fungus
that talk to each other.
And that the bushes and the vulgar flowers tend to
spend their time talking about whether or not it will rain,
and where's a good place to eat, and whether they feel fine
or stressed out, and they repeat the buzzing gossip
of bees, without even fact-checking it first!, and they tell each other if they hear
that a predator's around.
And the stardust people don't much like that:
the dirt and the fungus and all the busy talk
about being stressed and hungry and scrounging for life.
They want to hear about the trees.
I tell my friend
that scientists say that plants might scream when they are in danger
but only if other plants hear and react to them, is what the scientists say,
or else it might just be bubbles bursting in their stalks—
which means that we only scream if other people hear us
is what the scientists say
which means
that the sound a woman makes when the IDF
blows her whole family back into stardust
might not be a scream
if Americans say it's just a bubble bursting in her throat
which means that the sound a woman makes
when an ICE agent shoots her wife in the face
turning it back into a bouquet of roses
might not be a scream
if Americans say there's no imminent danger
that if a tree screams in the forest and no one wants to hear about it
maybe it didn't make a sound.
Because I think when the stardust people say
that the trees are talking to each other
they mean that they like the idea of talking being silent,
of not having to listen—
the same way they say they love cherry blossoms and pretty women
as long as the women don't gossip or talk about feeling stressed out
or tell each other when they hear
that a predator's around.
Because I think if you listen to the trees, and the weeds,
and women, people, cherry blossoms, bits of fungus in the dirt
and other things that are alive, unlike stardust—
you end up needing to hear about stress, and pain,
blood, dirt, and sex, the way violence
points the mind toward the base need for survival,
because living people talk about racism, and rape, and conspiracies,
and living off of tips and charity, and how to pay the rent
and be sick without health insurance, how to buy or steal groceries,
and about basketball, children’s birthdays, heavy metal music, and drugs
that don't make you feel connected so much as help you forget—
and I think that this as much as anything else must be
what the trees are talking about
but only if you stoop to listen to it—
the incorrigible prattle, speech of plants or people
falling all around us, like fiery bodies
and leaves in the autumn.
My friend tells me that trees are talking to each other:
he says maybe I should write a poem about it.