I consider a chestnut

       II.

When ere I saw the chestnut first, I took
From that botanic garden as my own
The image of its form—for it had grown
There at the taxis of the bridge and brook.

Grey was its bark, and fissured; in the crook
Of branchtips palmates sprawling outwards shone
With greeny serrate leaves; therein were sown
White panicles, pink-tongued, fair upon to look.

As Adam out among the beasts, I assayed
To name and take this object of étude
And fix its roots in that syntax of clades.

Aesculus it was by essence, or by name,
For there it stands in the System construed
By Carolus, which makes universal claim.

       IV.

“High in air,” writes Melville,
              “the beautiful
                             and bountiful
horse-chestnuts,
                             candelabra-wise,
proffer the passer-by
              their tapering
       upright cones
              of congregated blossoms.”
This is New Bedford,
                             whence the Pequod sallies forth,
bearing Ishmael & Ahab
              out
       to have that precious oil,
                             and Ahab on his hunt
for vengeance ‘gainst the whale
              who had so maimed
& torn his leg asunder.
                  And on the way
              seeks Ishmael to rectify
old, gross delusions
              of the whale by mounting intimate
       account of it, correcting
                             knowledge. He gives
              the hoary histories,
                                            the Bible
and before.
              He tells the second hand
                     accounts, and discourses
on failings
                             of sophistricated portraits.
He penetrates the whale,
              expounding down its bones.
He tells of how it came to be
              and of it what will come—
                             sempiternal.
      And it is the killings,
                             his too-pedantic lance,
that stimulate these sermons! that manifest
                             cetaceous nets,
not wise but merely
                                  otherwisely flawed,
              for he himself is seeking
                        for this whale now to wrest,
to cast claim o’er
          & own
                            what never can be held—
       in such Socratic struggle
                             no gnosis will suffice
and must the whale therefore go
              unfathomed.

into that stretch of schist and green. The white
-tailed deer that roamed his woods mingled
with the mountain laurel and the upswept oaks.

The soil was dark for all the planting he could do. He would
have wandered as I did in those dense pockets, the maples
in the understory young and lithe, and fattened, too,

his hogs on chestnuts—those keystones whose ribs assured
the split-rail fences and the houses rectitude,
resisting any form of rot. I ate sassafras

and did not stop to think of loss, nor sense
my very casual unknowing (having not yet turned to verse
to know of l’absence in Rilke’s grand & positive intent).

Instead I tripped in nettle by the Schuylkill,
its water coursing toward the city & the port
like in farther north Manhattan where, amidst the bristling,
sylvan smokestacks, a ship bore blight up to our shores

and at the birth of the last century, hurled it over all
the eastern seaboard, cleaving forty million chestnut trees
down to some sparse dozens.