Three Ways to Bless a Bay Tree: Bear Valley, Inverness, California by Erin Riordan

Bay laurel—

Apollo

proud god of the sun

made

you

his crown.

His hunger for Daphne

overthrew him,

ravenous to taste her,

desperate to belong to this flesh.

Daphne took refuge

in your fecundity.

Desperate, she clung to the earth,

& found her escape, downward,

where she took root becoming

a tree being

that the ghost of his want

could never touch.

II.

Apollo:

I dreamed of you in a garden by the sea.

You were getting married,

adorned in the greenery of harvest,

your bride swollen with child.

I watched from the sky.

& I could not bear it.

I flew toward you

& my chest rubbed against your cheek.

You swatted me like a fly

before you leaned over to kiss your bride.

Flowers blossomed from her mouth.

I would have cried.

but ghosts have no tears.

I demanded of the sea

“Give me your salty brine,”

and yet, the sea shunned me.

All that remained

was my hunger.

III.

Daphne:

Leave me be, Apollo.

I have made my choice.

I love no human or god.

I am betrothed to the exquisite earth.

But I do not regret your chase.

Take my leaves and weave me.

Your crown can never touch what I feel.

The pleasures that surge in me

My roots reach into the dark.

The tickling iridescence as the butterfly probes me.

The fragrance of manzanita mingles.

Don’t chase me.

Plant yourself

in the earth.

Plant your feet

in the soil

where my roots may someday find you.

But you can’t understand what I say to you now.

Instead of words, you hear the rustling of my branches.

You haven’t slowed down enough

to feel who reaches back for you.

What would it take, Apollo,

for you to hear me?

When will you hear the sap

that bleeds

where you cut

my branches

to make your crown?

Bio

Erin Riordan studied creative writing at Marlboro College and practiced Zen Buddhism at the San Francisco Zen Center. She lives in West Marin, California. Her writing articulates intersections between the felt human experience and place. She sees writing as a life-affirming practice, affirming the mysterious wildness of being human, language, and land.

Author's note

I wrote this poem after spending much of the day sitting inside trees in Bear Valley. I first sat inside a giant hollowed-out redwood stump and then later, when I had a notebook in hand and wrote the poem itself, nestled in the truck of a bay tree. This is a poem about dissociation, from our bodies, from the earth, and the intensity of the longing to embody fully and to remember our essential and inescapable intimacy with the earth. We are living in a time of mass dissociation both individually and collectively. I see this need to deeply listen to our earthy, carnal, microbially diverse bodies as the heart of the climate crisis. Without being attuned to the elemental messages of the earth, an attunement born of embodiment, one becomes cut off from the cries of the earth, be it a tree, the soil, an animal, a flower, or another human being and so narcissism of Apollo results. And yet, there remains inconceivably great compassion in nature, as expressed in Daphne's voice, who invite us back to ourselves even after the violence inflicted by the Apollos of our wounding.