Concerto Grosso for Ghost Forests
1st Movement
Ghost, n.: The soul or spirit… manifesting in the physical world, typically as a shadowy, nebulous image, a presence capable of moving objects, an eerie disembodied voice, etc.; an apparition, a spectre, a phantom, often haunting a specific location: “He was in the position of a man who does not believe in ghosts, but does not rest easy in a haunted house.” (OED)
Bootheel moon. Ghost-
of-green, the forest bronzed
below stone tors. Lodgepole torsos eyed open
to beetle-bloom.
Not dewdrops. Not
opals, the pitch tubes’ opacity: cream-pale reveals the tree successfully
resisting; red- or orange-tinged, there the beetle
entered. Won.
As Maya Lin looked out her studio window in Colorado and saw a massive die-off of pine trees because of beetle kill, the project, star-like, began to form, until she knew: The only thing I really want to do is bring a ghost forest to downtown Manhattan.
When pollen’s propelled
from cones, the powder’s
so powered the tree seems to
explode: the moment
fogs, sheds—golden embers.
The moment seen before lost
to the anticipation
of nostalgia.
Transient tourist of haunted
histories, returning to these mountains
whose evergreen slopes
I grew up beneath, each morning begins
with trees.
Felled cones knob
the forest floor, sewn
from knotted sets
of long needles—three,
then three more. The tree boles
hole-peppered: nests
of three-toed woodpeckers
who feed on the beetle-
blooms they follow.
Like a drizzling of wax stars, pitch tubes
staccato the trunks—lodgepole, ponderosa. Like fat wept
through puzzle-pieced skin—edge-crisped and
crackling like pan-fried bacon as streaked as last
season’s turkey-tail mushrooms rayed ivory/fawn/
sunset-orange/fox-red on the fallen who yet
remain. The gift of rot: rainbow.
Recent, here, beetle-bloom, the forest not yet
open; the crowns yet dense, some yet not brown.
Memory yet matched
in patches.
Lost, yet here. The wooded stems. Dotted not
with sugar-dusting, not salt’s shaved
crystals, the granular shimmer of each gluey
dollop; not distance as a windstorm’s glass-shattering
embedding a body soft as the larvae
who devour the tree from the inside
out. This weeping, the tree’s own masticated body
made sawdust, bedding spilt from the cradle-point
of egg galleries whose delicate
fossil calligraphy’s revealed only after the tree
is lost.
Short-term effects recorded
elsewhere, post-bloom: loss,
for rodents, of cone-crops;
boon, the new growth
of forb-cover for deer,
for moose, who feed there—
for elk, who respond well
to even the most severe
loss. Long-term:
will what’s on the horizon always be
horizon? No still point to turn
away
from. No storm’s eye to see
from before the tempo
speeds—
Fact: A fire-damaged pine is more vulnerable to beetle attacks. A beetle-attacked tree is more likely to burn.
Droste effect:
a simulacrum of infinity, as in an NFT mimicking oil
painting, a girl kneeling in a forest clearing
facing the viewer to whom she thrusts out her hand
as if to sign stop, on her palm a tattoo of a girl
kneeling in a forest signing stop, her palm
tattooed by girl, trees, so on, repetition shrinking to a single
evergreen brush stroke we are to imagine
as survival, a centered image—girl,
trees—merely distant: future
as an infinite repetition, as if the surface
doesn’t reveal all dissolves where fails
resolve.
Doppler effect:
If the siren’s pitch shrills
as it nears an emergency
not followed downscales
decline indistinguishable
from decrescendo the
frequency tumbles is
disappeared into else-
where by the static
observer
The centered open-ended: convergence
of keynote, keyhole.
Keynote: the note
from which a key, a scale, is latticed. The key of E
has four sharps. There is no key of O because music
is built from repetition that can, on a piano, be spanned
by a single hand.
Keyhole: the specter
of an unlocking. An opening that awaits
opening.
Coveted,
the gorgeous stain
of beetle-kill blue. Artfully turned,
the urn I hold in my hands highlights
the blue, smoking across gradations
of clouded pine: inverted earth, clouds,
Blue Marble seen from space or some
world after.
Words I’ve printed
on plantation pine pulp, scissored
from white space, I fold
and slip there, into its one
held breath, for some future
seaming. Tree within tree. Ghost
within ghost.
An accrual
of stilled wings. Like monarchs caught in the dawning
end-time of migration the parasite OE, Ophryocystis
elektroscirrha, hastens, weakening them so in their mass
pour south even the shrinking seasonal descent of ice
overtakes them.
Sized to a single rice grain, the pine beetle holds
in its mouth the blue fungus like the name of a god
not yet to be spoken.
A secret scripture.
Where moss-pelts
once northerned: postmortem, lodgepoles yet
let drop cones of locketed
seeds the forest, gone to gold,
torches open.
2nd Movement
Forest, v., transitive: To place in a forest. Apparently an isolated use. 1818 J KEATS Endymion ii. 67 “O Haunter chaste Of river sides, and woods… Where… Art thou now forested?” (OED)
Lin: The trees are totemic sculptures…; from one grew the constellation of the remaining forty-eight.
Metronome moon: ebb,
swell. Bloomed
whole, strengthened
the storm-swell
to come.
For Ghost Forest, Lin selected and oversaw the removal of forty-nine Atlantic white cedars from New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
Expected, the moon-effect. The never-
before-seen: how the storm
ebbed, reformed, strengthened,
swerved: the left hook
the storm took, west-northwest. The depths
of flood. How the forest, overcome,
brewed.
Steeped in salt since 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, each tree was barely hanging onto life…what you would call the Walking Dead, on its way out but… still technically alive.
Transported to Manhattan, the trees were telephone-pole planted, for their weight’s risk, eight, not six, feet deep in Madison Square Park, where, in 2021, for six months they stood.
The grove holstered yet
no cordons. Cemented,
there, next to the rooted, so
there’s remote presence’s re-
membered here, where
post-lockdown,
I travel by train, masked, in a near-empty car. Find the park filled with picnickers. Office workers with sack lunches, nannies who spread blankets for their charged children beneath the installation’s temporary near-dead and the park’s “permanent” living.
In salt is prophecy. When sea water is trapped behind high land following massive storm surge, saltwater inundation typically takes 3-5 years to kill
the forest.
A dam
is faster.
Belize’s Raspaculo valley, the most pristine tropical rainforest
north of the Amazon, riparian habitat of jaguars, of Ara macao cyanoptera—
northern Central American scarlet macaw, rare subspecies;
of iguanas, oropendolas, spider monkeys, howler
monkeys, ocelots, three-toed
tapirs, collared peccaries, keel-billed
motmots—
Chalillo: the hydro-
scheme proposed, the “160-foot concrete cork,”
whose projected effects were well-known: to be drowned,
were it built,
the valley, entire.
One trope
in story told as history: post-battle, victors would sow salt
in the fields, in the earth bared beneath the razed cities’ ruins. Specific
versions of the story may be built myth upon myth; whether it happened—
in Carthage, in Shechem—is unknown. If it happened, whether symbolic
gesture, curse, actual poisoning of the fields, is unknown. Hurricane Sandy
is known:
where the forest
was salted, trees died. Do we not live, then,
in mythic times?
Hunger’s aftermath: how else see
beetle-kill blue?
Storm-freed snow geese flown
to cornflower-smoke. The flooded sockets
of cenotes. Fog-seeped
grottoes, echo of cobwebs scrolled
onto doves’ necks.
If the means of meaning, attention, remain
metaphorical, accrual a need for ritual approaching
music, which is host—body, or word? Which, parasite?
At one point [Lin] said, “Can we stop time?”
Revelation, n.: when the bark
peels away.
3rd Movement
Ghost, v., transitive. To ignore or pretend not to know (a person); spec. to cease to respond to (a person)… esp. as a means of ending a relationship suddenly and without explanation; (hence) to end a relationship or association with (a person) by ceasing all communication.
Ghost: v., transitive, literary and poetic. Of a ghost: to haunt (a person or place). 1879 H. N. Hudson Hamlet 10 “The being thus ghosted was held to be no such trifling matter as we are apt to consider it.” (OED)
The shadow… is equal to the form.
Crescent moon.
Bromeliad evening. Star
lichens. Black orchid breath
beneath green-
net sky. Horizon sweet
with still here.
Horizon: what a soil layer is called. Of the six master horizons, O denotes organic—needle, leaf, twig, fauna as well as flora—where decomposition begins, in wetlands, in virgin or long uncut forests where water may surface. O’s middle layer, Oe, hemic layer of intermediate decomposition, subhorizons litter and humus. Bleached, leached of clay, of iron, the master horizon E pales against O, may appear nearly bone-white. Only bisection reveals the layering of earth, the structure of horizon. To master horizon, one must dig.
Victory Lake Trail: a wooded path for decades I’ve walked at my rural college. No lake
remains. Victory disappeared overnight, a quarry’s drilling sucking the groundwater
from its limestone lace bed. Sliced from wetlands, the lake dug as memorial
to drafted students who did not return
from the Western front, from trenches
dug horizon
by horizon. From above, the earthen understory might
have seemed a snaking shadow, a seam across endless
mud fields. But there was no above. Only the absence
of distance, of sun’s tracery across sky.
Of horizon.
On the brink of a wide-open century, environmentalists warn
Chalillo will destroy rare species’ habitat, extensive, yet-to-be
excavated Mayan archeological sites. Will be uneconomic. Will be
unstable. As protest
crescendos, the developers, nonetheless
persevere.
Geological faults, fractures, in the company-paid-for feasibility study
miraculously disappear. Bedrock is certified granite, not the sandstones
interbedded with soft shales it is well
known to be.
One theme to response: decoy. Hedgerows
of henceforth.
Bowed tremolo
of cellos. Whether treble,
alto, bass, a musical staff’s always expressed
as five flatlines, five horizons, parallel page after page. Because
the note in play, the you-are-here dot, is constant
motion, the tracks never blur
to vanishing point. Composition has no vanishing because horizon—
never near, nor distant—is always equipresent.
Does that mean, then, that music alone
is eternal?
Tenor, and vehicle: the terms assume convergence may
be severed—vessel, from god. Stem,
from root.
Foreground
and horizon, cleaved.
To close
a dam: meaning the wall
is sealed. Meaning
power’s now open
for business. Meaning commerce
commences.
What slept as cypher
wakes here as ruin. The dam
was closed. Meaning the valley,
drowned.
Afterlife of disaster, Chalillo Lake’s waterline I trudge: mud-map
a single tapir’s tracks star. Stumps
of severed trees;
erosion-bared roots, octopus-spread, grip with their shadows
solely air, soil’s—horizon’s—
ghost.
Atmospheric mercury, what a tree breathes in, holds
in bole wood. Far on the new lake’s horizon, limbless,
now, the tallest trees remain—Ceiba pentandra, Chicle,
Quamwood. To compound the project’s profit
not cut. Not removed. Left standing
to rot, to bloom
conversion: mercury to methylmercury
biomagnified in the flesh
of Bay Snook. Staple for the Maya
downstream.
A river beneath a dam is said to hunger. A hungry river
eats its own bed, scours its banks clean even as its once pristine
sand and pebble beds are swallowed by muck released
from the reservoir’s
depths, from flood’s
fever-brew.
After swimming downstream, red sores spot my legs; children’s necks flare
crimson, florid with rash. Hungry river: the deaths of trees I wear for weeks
on my skin embed the bodies of those who, as long as the forest, once
had thrived here.
One horizon, ghost forest; one, a scattering
of scarlet macaws in distant green. Still
gorgeous, the ruby flashes, the sapphire-tipped wing
feathers that distinguish the Northern subspecies
born of isolation, by the forest
broken. To settle
at salvage, is that to savage
what might have been?
Coveted salvage, beetle-kill blue: floorboards. Picture
frames. Urn. Born of urgency: the window of time
in which to harvest beetle-kill pine always close
to closing.
Open, close: note how the long vowel
echoes there—doloroso, the ghost
of survival, a closing chord held
by a piano’s sustain pedal. A reluctance to let go
of composition’s endpoint.
Like staffed notes, syntax presents
a present absence, a beetle gallery’s fossil-trail
echoing the serifed flourishes
of creweled roots, pebble-
bejeweled,
revealed in a dig’s
horizon. Victory: In the new century’s emptied bed, trees sprout—hardwoods
and pine, bald cypress. Over the decades a small forest grows; then, recovery—
water rising above roots, the socket slowly filling, the hardwoods and pines
slowly dying in the immensity beyond need, what the cypress now
thrive in. Sweetgum, loblolly, they drop their limbs, abundance
not theirs honing them to poles rooted to the reflection of their paring
in waters rising now
as wetlands. Ghost forest here a held palm
of water absent human hands. After heavy rain, the path is crossed
by rivulets one must step over, then through. Path and water
seamed.
If ghost is both an abandonment and a lingering, at once absence
and presence, does music ghost a staff until the notes
are inked, or until the hand, the breath, resurrects them
as transience, as echo?
Fermata: the bird’s-eye pause means
to extend rest: The eye opens, yet
sees not.
The scales remain, ghosts.
1996, the year I left Colorado, infestation
began, beetle-kill just ghosting
the horizon. Chance synchronicity, not pastoral
revision, the root of my disorientation,
revisiting: cleavage between remembered
and reentered. Between absence
and presence.
Might we yet
be spelled here, for one
more moment remember how
to forget? Before the emergence
of emergency accelerandoes
to forego
the foregone?
Howler monkey, horned
owl, coyote, grey
wolf—once
lost, the forest keystone morphs
to keyhole.
To remember: No spell from loss. No rest
of. From.
To forget: To no longer be present
for the no-longer-present.
Victory:
Wet spell ended, the sweep
recedes; from sheer sheet’s left the cobbled bottom, webbed
nerves, deep pockets
I watch a single treefrog
slip to. The span
of my hand, sunfish after
sunfish: heaps of bodies, some solely
skeleton; some still bearing tattered, parchment
skin; all haphazardly spread like sodden, sun-
bleaching flyers, plane-dropped—whatever their message
erased by rain. But these not water-wrecked: wreck
water’s lack, moisture only veining
the jagged cracks of mud’s puzzled
hardening.
Herons, egrets, fled,
for now—
Horizon still ghosted
with horizon.
Is to thread the needle to blind
the eye, bind the pane, burn time when in short
time all time will be—will all time be—
historic?
4th Movement
Ghost, v., intransitive. To move or act in a manner characteristic or reminiscent of a ghost; (now) spec. to glide smoothly and effortlessly, esp. without being spotted or touched.
Ghost, v., intransitive. Of a sailing vessel: to make relatively good progress when there is very little wind. Usually followed by an adverb or adverbial phrase expressing movement, as along, up, etc.: “We sailed round the Lizard and ghosted up on an evening breeze…”; “[they] ghosted along apparently in a wind of their own.” (OED)
Horned moon. Vespered
stain that remains as night
recedes. When ospreys overscore
screech owls.
Jekyll. Barrier island, hide of maritime forest—saw palmetto, live oak,
loblolly pine—
Beyond shore, noon spoons to gold
the fresh-for-now pond
where wood storks emerge
from the reflected selves they
hover over.
The northernmost edge erodes
to teeter-zone. Toppled trees stretch, scores
of them, dense wood once evergreen—
skeletons, now, where people
wed between
sunrise photographers, tripods stilling the revelation of light over
water,
over bone. The cone of concern’s
not the progress
of the felled: Loss
not new,
the barrier island’s eastern edge
long going under—
New, the speed. How the stretch
so extends—not treeless:
rootless. Driftwood Beach:
Boneyard honeyed
with dawn.
To illuminate
a fish skeleton, a colony of beetles may be introduced to corpse; thus
hunger-freighted, the delicate architecture emerges—spine-held, the twin fans
of bone hairs may recall a miniature whaling ship, thorn-thin ivory masts
to be tweezed fully open only once stoppered in the blown glass bottle whose clutch
it was imagined for.
For the conceit to be viable, one must imagine further the whole
immersed; in total internal reflection, the spine is hull, is horizon surfacing, from
which reflection bends to anchor sea to sky:
to drift.
Vulnerable to wind-throw, to crown-
fires, to salt, Atlantic white cedar
graces only freshwater swamps
within a narrow coastal line. Resistant
to decay; to shrinking, to warping,
in seasoning; to fungi, to insects,
which may harm but rarely
will kill. Atlantic white cedar:
boat cedar.
The installation was never meant
to be permanent. Afterlife
evolved.
On a crisp October day, Carla Murphy, a trustee of the nonprofit Rocking the Boat, was running through Madison Square Park when the soundscape of Ghost Forest
stopped her cold: for her
it echoed the Bronx River’s music their teens discover
embarking on sail boats they build by hand
from white cedar. Echoed here, though the track loops
calls, languages,
once common, no longer,
to Manhattan: Gray fox. Cougar. American black bear, elk, wild
turkey; Lenape’s Southern Unami, Munsee.
Before once and for all
the trees came down, Murphy knew
she had to ask.
Common, yet
remarkable, on Jekyll, the density
of the downed: what holds
the drowned live oaks to shore long
after the fallen pines buoy
to sea, long after saw palmettoes’ brooms shred
to flotsam.
Fell zone, where the skeletons
cleft open to slender hollows, recessed
ledges froth-fleck
phosphorescent. Port
to feed from, pebbled, not-yet-
ghosted shells
shelve there—the door opens, the soft foot
cements them, then
horned eyes emerge, secreted rows
of hooked teeth:
Littoraria nebulosa. Cloudy periwinkle,
moon-glossed whorls
crowned copper:
what thrives on the fallen,
what I photograph.
Goldenrod. Neon-
green. Roosted
dovecote, jewel-
trove—
Abacus beads, tiny globes hennaed
with latitude lines. Dust-ringed planets, distance-
dwarfed—grace notes. Broken chords, seam
of arpeggio. Tenor and vehicle:
seamless. Lin,
over the moon the trees were once more
to be reborn, now
from water’s rising, immediately said
yes. The teens there to see Ghost Forest
downed.
To build a cedar boat requires both water
and fire. Of the cypress family, Atlantic white cedar,
with steam, softens; its strength in bending
without breaking. Can be shaped to both rib
and plank. Stern to stem, horizon
upon horizon, five were to be built
of Ghost Forest.
Cracked open, on Jekyll, the live oak, no longer so, rivers
and swirls, its mapped grain quilling to amoebae-like contour lines
which seal to signal hill here, mountain there. What laces
the pale wood purple not a heart-held secreted beauty
but a salt-loving, heat-bloomed bacteria. Now inseparable
from host, the microbe’s rouge what saves it from burn, light
spectacular here as sun on the Bronx River rowing past a failed
factory’s crumbling smokestack, a park’s grassy gap, as the fire
of white egrets rising to reveal a single great
blue heron, crest- and chest-plumes rippling, slipping
along shore.
In the installation’s end days, I wander among picnickers,
I lie at the absent roots, beneath bare twigged limbs,
a tangle of root hairs taking hold
in a beetle-kill blue sky. My body, the salted soil
and the salt, seeping.
O protégé of storms yet
to be woven, the once remote seems
so close now. So bent on beyond
we were, we knew not the forest
nor the trees. To recollect’s not
to recover. Yet to sever
was never
to unroot. There were
no monster-moments. No comet-screech
to end these ends we’ve left
to world. Torn
strips of scribbled-on paper
folded over
and over into an urn
of beetle-kill pine. Whose lid
I open.
Note: A Baroque form, the concerto grosso includes a small group of solo instruments and full orchestra; unlike the concerto form, where a single instrument takes the melodic forefront over the full orchestra, in the concerto grosso the composition’s musical material passes between soloists and orchestra. In “Concerto Grosso for Ghost Forests,” the solo instruments are E, O, and EO; the orchestra consists of AUIEO, in any combination or order. The poem scores this by grounding the soloists’ sections at the left margin, while the tutti (all-vowel) sections always begin indented and never touch the left margin. The Maya Lin quotes regarding Ghost Forest integrated (via italics) here are from Ghost Forest (Full Documentary), Madison Square Park Conservancy, YouTube, 2021, except for the quote “The trees are totemic sculptures…,” which is from an interview with the artist by Osman Can Yerebakan published on Artforum, June 22, 2021.
Sandra Meek has published six books of poems, most recently Still (Persea Books, 2020), named a New & Noteworthy Poetry Book by The New York Times Book Review. Her seventh collection, Bind, in which “Concerto Grosso with Ghost Forests” appears, will be released by Persea Books in January 2027.
Read more poetry by Sandra Meek appearing in Terrain.org: three poems, the Letter to America poem “Abracadabra,” the poem “Still Life with Damnosa Heriditas and Dark Constellations,” and two poems.
Header photo of Victory Lake, Berry College by Sandra Meek. Photo of Sandra Meek by Paul O’Hara.
