Down this hill, about a mile from where we’ve parked and picked up the trail, is a tree I love. It’s dead, stripped of its bark, and a pale, washed silver. 

For years, it stood at an angle to the sky, tangled in another tree mid-fall, and on bright blue days its silver glowed blue when we approached it. I would wait for the moment after we picked our way across the bog at the bottom of the hill, turned slightly to the right and then caught sight of the tree. 

It wasn’t always blue—time of day and conditions of the sky would determine that—and I think that’s what I loved. That, and the casual way it had moved a strip of sky from one place to another.

We’re coming up on it now and I don’t know if I’ll say anything. It slipped completely to the ground a year ago and it doesn’t matter, or matters in a different way. Its blue is gone. There’s a hole cut out of the side of the trail where it would be, tugging at me a little. 

I remember how stuck I was, more than thirty-five years ago, working on my dissertation. I used to daydream about poking out an eye with a pencil so that I’d have a reason for just sitting on the couch and getting nowhere. This emptiness feels like that. 

What got me going again was playing around with a pair of scissors. I had a pile of photocopied chapters from Robert Duncan’s unpublished H.D. Book that I’d found in little magazines in the library’s Rare Book Room stacked up next to me, and I began cutting out paragraphs and then individual sentences, thinking I’d arrange them in various ways until they spoke to me and got me moving. Maybe they did. 

I’ve lost the paragraphs I’d saved, but I’ve hung on, all these years, to those yellowing pages with the holes cut out of them. Rectangles, little windows, Duncan’s daybook entry March 13, Monday, 1961, for example, cut open once or twice on almost every page and speaking to me still. I think I was cutting shapes out of my emptiness. 

I couldn’t tell you, back then, how much I was struggling and what I thought I saw there. But I can show you the pages—crinkled, black-bordered from the copier, the marks of the scissors sometimes bold, sometimes hesitatingly considering. Red underlines on the pages beneath still showing through, like the scarlet flowers near the inlet stream we know to look for this time of year.