Oldest pine

'A 10,500-year-old Huon pine, believed to be the world's oldest tree, was handed back to Tasmania yesterday by mining company Pasminco.'
(Sydney Morning Herald, April 24, 1998.)

Years grew in rings,
but my earliest memories
sought bird-dialect, the
hush of water and wind.

Men could hear then,
stood with forest-silence;
the leaf-like breathing
at my base made speech.

The loud and glacial
grumbling of boulder -
ice ceased in my first years,
ferns eventually uncoiled.

I thought myself ever
which is now at a closing;
yet I did not regard
this end without mystery.

Other pine-tree that
built memory in fire onto
their bark's surface,
recorded an earlier time;

they hide mostly in the
moist gullies and deep rift
valleys (branches radial):
an ancient pine tree.

Unchanged - whose
photo is found locked in
the earth's element, an old
family and they are few.

The wide-branched
rivers that angled mirrors
under the sun, are gone
underground, they

emerged from within
the ice-tides, mountains fell
when the sky opened, the
seas had retreated.

They are shadow leaves.
They flow many-branched.
They house every myth.
They rise in me to air.

© Stephen Oliver
(from the collection: Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000.)

© Steven Oliver