The Tree Line

The larch trees are moving north
with the tree line. There is no god;
great boreal forests circle our planet
in an almost unbroken ring. No god put 
the plants in a greenhouse, so they’d 
grow faster and higher. There is no 
god; the larch had followed their own 
algorithm for thousands of years. Spruce,
jack pine, lichen, every tree its own noise.
Pines are social creatures. Yew live forever. 
It's quite easy to see the tree line moving;
it's fair to say we know enough. There is 
no god; there are three stations in Siberia 
monitoring the release of methane. 
Ice beats south in winter, north in summer,
and the boreal exhales, with far more trees 
than all the rainforests put together. 
Their roots pump water inland, overturning 
the entire Arctic ocean. There is no god; 
the great ring of evergreen licks clean 
the atmosphere and turns out water 
for us, we hope, forever. 

Chevrutah¹

"Scholars who sit alone to study the Torah become stupid" 
—Yosi b. R. Hanina, Talmud, Berakhot 63b²

A former racehorse named Midnight Lovin’ twitches 
his haunches in the dusty corral. He misreads 
the prompt, doesn’t know how to turn clockwise 
when Beth leads him home in the spring of 2017

because humans designed the flat, oval tracks, 
and humans preferred counter-clockwise.
Turn left, turn left, turn left — NASCAR rules, 
speed-skating rules — life’s little mysteries.³

In the great plains, vast open spaces, 
eerie silence…but any feeling of emptiness…
is an illusion. The plains of our planet support
the greatest gatherings of wildlife on Earth.

Beth, firm and straight, in her heeled boots: We can 
shoulder this burden together! Every day enters 
the horse’s stall holding in her hand a sweet gift 
his lips open. Persuades him to turn, even jump.

Two animals talk in their kinesics of healing:
a sentence aloud, then pause, then either partner 
can ask a question, can ask a question, can comment.
Knees almost touching, ears swiveling, active listening 

in the heat of discussion, wave their hands, even shout.
Job, for example, asks [    ], Why do innocents suffer?⁴
Thus [      ] answered Job from the wind in the grass,
Have you given the horse his strength? 
Have you clothed his neck with fierceness?⁵

Midnight drops to his side and rolls over, tracing
angels in the dust. Over and over his hooves rise
and run in the air, his long tail swishing a cloud.
Beth, the witness. Round about his teeth are terror.⁶

At the heart of all that happens here is a single 
living thing: grass. This miraculous plant covers 
a quarter of all the lands of the Earth. Grasslands
exist wherever there is a little rain but not enough⁷

He snorts at flies, shies in cold weather — as 
although Job blessed with fourteen thousand sheep 
and six thousand camels and a thousand yoke 
of oxen and a thousand she-asses, and after this 

lived a hundred and forty years…⁸
his wealth restored, he turns in circles, 
completely befuddled with gratitude,
nervously shaking his head at his luck.

As one summer day Midnight refuses to budge. 
His eight-pound heart utters questions he can’t articulate, 
stomps his black hoof into the ground, shakes 
his big head side to side, his mane whispering 

to his withers as Beth’s hand and voice in his ear 
say sh sh I’m sorry I’m sorry.

¹ “Chavrusa is an Aramaic word meaning "friendship"[1] or "companionship";[4] it can also mean "group of fellows".[5] The Rabbis of the Mishnah and Gemara uses the cognate term chaver (חבר, "friend" or "companion" in Hebrew) to refer to the one with whom a person studies Torah.[6][7] In contemporary usage, chavrusa is defined as a "study partnership".[6][8][9]” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavrusa)

² Sinclair, Dr. Julian (5 November 2008). "Chavruta". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 26 June 2011. Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavrusa 

³ https://www.livescience.com/32442-why-are-races-run-counterclockwise.html

⁴ https://jewishcurrents.org/the-horse-in-jewish-religious-text

⁵ https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2739.htm (Job 39: 19)

⁶ Job 41:14

⁷ Planet Earth 07 Great Plains Part 01 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W30QNDapVDA)

⁸ https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2742.htm (Job 42:12,16)

Josette Akresh-Gonzales is the author of "Apocalypse on the Linoleum" (Lily Poetry Review Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, JAMA, The Pinch, The Journal, Breakwater Review, PANK, and many other journals. A recent poem has been included in the anthology Choice Words (Haymarket). She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Josette lives in the Boston area with her husband and two boys and rides her bike to work at a nonprofit medical publisher. Website: josettepoet.com.

Note about these poems: These two poems are part of a project I'm working on, celebrating nature, science, humanity, and the possibility of divinity (the supreme and ultimate reality? creator of the universe?) with each section of the book titled with the same name as the BBC documentary "Planet Earth" episode. Within the sections there is either one long poem ("Mountains," for example) or multiple poems. "The Tree Line" is part of the "Ice Worlds" section, and "Chevrutah" is in the "Great Plains" section.