The Definite Article

To cover the ground from tree to tree

an infinity of words to move from a to the.

Imagine a tree.  Any tree.  Better yet plop yourself down in the yard next to some glorious specimen or some pathetic twig.  Now describe it.  Maybe it's sort of like those charts that we used in grade school for classifying trees: evergreen or deciduous, pinnate or foliate, rounded leaves or pointed, green or red.  Ah, got it: Japanese Maple.  But even with that the intent was never to identify a specific tree, only a type, a family.

Like classifying your neighbor as homo sapiens when what we are really trying to relate is Bob, the plumber, the guy with a wife who makes the best blueberry pie in three counties, and an only child who struggles in school but he hopes it's because of some as yet undefined learning disability, but nothing has been found not yet, and he can't really afford the tests they want to do because he's a couple of weeks late already on the mortgage since his business slowed down, and he got a bad review on Angie's List when he lost the clutch in his truck and showed up late at that rich widow's house and then he thought she was coming on to him but he ignored her because he'd never cheated on his wife in seventeen years of marriage, had never even been tempted, well maybe a little bit, a couple of times maybe.  What was I saying?

As a poet, I struggle mightily with the definite article, the attempt to take something from the general to the specific.  The trouble with getting specific is figuring out what is enough, when I have given sufficient information, without venturing over the line into too much.  Beating the dead horse, as it were.

See, I cheated there, lacking something clear and fresh, I used a cliched phrase as shorthand, something that we have all agreed on as having a generally understood meaning, even though very few of us have horses anymore, fewer still have ever beat one, live or dead.

This for me is one of the fundamental breakdowns of language: the inability to allow some other to understand what I am thinking, what I am feeling, or even what I am seeing.  If we are standing together in some sun-drenched field on a late fall afternoon, with a single aspen quaking golden in the soft breeze with just a hint of a moisture and decay in the air, and a thin layer of lavender from somewhere unseen, then we can agree on the tree.  That one.  The one in front of us quaking.  But how do I make you understand that tree from a remove, through the intermediary of language?

Which is why at times to overcome the remove of language, we have to lose the words and experience the tree in all its treeness.  No amount of words can bridge that existential gulf, so give it up.  Sit there and  let the tree be, and take that in.  If you define it, you lose it.

Now, that's I what I want to capture on the page, the thingness of things being what they are.  Being is not intrasitive, it is active.  Being does not "is" being bes, every molecule and spinning electron dancing its necessary dance.

Which is why a tree is so much less demanding than the tree.  But as a poet I want to get to the.