Poets Touching Trees

Tree Interview with Ben Pease   photo: Northampton, MA

Do you ever think about trees?

 I think trees are always in the back of my mind. That is, I don’t have pictures of trees plastered above the bed or anything, but I was just in Vermont for a week, and god bless ‘em! At this time of year,  you can just throw me under a tree, and I’ll happily watch the leaves rustle around in the wind. I helped Guy Pettit plant some trees outside Flying Object, and besides how satisfying that whole process is, you can’t argue with the positive action of planting a tree. On the other hand, at Bianca’s grandmother’s house in Goshen we are renovating ), this guy just came by and re-appraised the house. He pointed out a few trees that were touching the house and needed to be cut back if not taken out entirely. In those cases, I can’t cut those trees down fast enough—to protect something that is so important to someone I love.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

The backyard of my parents’ house rolled down into what became the woods. It was for the most part unimpeded forest up until whoever owned it sold the land, and a developer turned it into a horseshoe street of new houses with only about 200 yards of trees separating the new houses from my street. That in and of itself was a personal Princess Mononoke lesson: some people will bulldoze anything in their path to get what they want, you understand why they do it, but you still can’t completely forgive them for all that destruction. 

When I was somewhere around the end of elementary school/the beginning of middle school, I was given a pair of leather moccasin slippers. I loved wearing them around the house, and sometimes I would wear them to take the dog out. I was saving up my money to buy a bow my uncle had for sale at his gun shop. It was a decent Browning compound that he was selling to me for a good price, like $150 or so, but it took me a long time to save up that much money. I probably spent more time looking at bows in catalogs than anything, and at some point I decided I was going to make my own traditional bow and arrow. I didn’t read up on how to make one or anything; I figured I could just sort of wing it, and it would all work out. My first step was to take one of the laces from my moccasin slippers, which were about two feet in length, and tie it to a tree in the woods behind my parents’ house. My tween brain was convinced this would loosen and stretch out the leather shoelace and turn it into a perfect bowstring. I tied it to the branch of a tree no less than five feet from the property line and waited exactly one month before retrieving it. I never found it.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

In the opening section of Chateau Wichman, trees play a pretty big part. It’s been a couple years since I wrote that, and while I remember I had a very specific idea of what I meant by the leaves being “twice stilled […] since the last gust of wind,” it takes me a minute to figure it out again. In my new long poem, the psychic has a dream where he walks through a forest of sorts.

Ben Pease is the editor of Monk Books and a member of The Ruth Stone Foundation. He has degrees from Emerson College and Columbia University. A selection from CHATEAU WICHMAN appeared in chapbook form under the title WICHMAN COMETH. His work can be found online here.

Tree Interview with Sophia Le Fraga

Do You Ever Think About Trees?

I think about trees constantly, almost as much as I think about the sky.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

A friend told me this once a while back: Every time we breathe in and out, we inhale and exhale many many molecules of gas. Each time we exhale, about 1.5x10^23 molecules exit our bodies and go into the atmosphere. That’s trillions and trillions. And tons of these are CO2, which plants love and need to photosynthesize. The atmosphere has a one year mixing period, meaning that after a year, gases in the atmosphere are blended evenly around our planet. This means that your breath from last year is in India and Brazil and Mexico and everywhere else. So plants and trees, which need this CO2, suck in huge amounts of it through their leaves. Some of that CO2 came from you. In fact, every blade of grass and every single leaf has about 6-20 CO2 molecules that came just from you. That same amount came from me, from every other Poet Touching a Tree, from my sister and your mom and anyone else that you know. And so we are all physically connected, through space and time.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Very. Trees keep us all connected. The Internet wishes it was a tree.

Go Green and checkout Sophia Le Fraga’s website: http://slefraga.blogspot.com/

Tree Interview with Bianca Stone

Do you ever think about trees?

I have Important Trees of Eastern Forests on my desk. It’s a U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service booklet from 1968. I’ve used it in a poem before.

I see now that the previous owner cut out a newspaper chart of “Plant Pests and Diseases” and left it in the book. One of the pests is the Japanese beetle. I remember those from my childhood. We’d pick them off the plants in the garden and the trees for grandma. She hated them. I’d put them in a tin can and throw in a leaf and slam it shut again. They’re hard to kill. They were huge and ravenous and shinny.

In this chart is says they have

Copper wings,
metallic blue
body

Plants and Damage

Tomatoes, eggplant, cu-
cumber, flowers.
Pepper leaves with
tiny holes

Control

0.75% rotenone dust
5% methoxychlor
dust, or 0.5%
lindane dust

Disease

Helminthospotium
blights and melting out

I love thinking about how Stephan Hawking said, while hypothesizing about alien life, that it might already be here…but they move so fast we seem like trees to them.


What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

There’s two cottonwood trees in our yard at mom’s house. They snow fuzz every spring; sending out their little seeds. It’s beautiful and horrible.

I used to climb up the smaller one all the way to the top and carve thing into the trunk. It’s all still there, year after year. I LOVE SO-AND-SO or I HATE MY LIFE or 1998.

Also I was a tree in our school play. Twice. The Wizard of Oz and in The Lorax.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

How could they not be?

We’re inextricably linked with them. And poets know that best.

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her collection of poetry “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows” is forthcoming from Tin House/Octopus Books. She lives in Brooklyn.

Go Green and read some Bianca Stone Poets: http://bombsite.com/articles/7075

Tree Interview with Michael J. Wilson

Do you ever think about trees?

All the time.

They remind me of the nervous system, the circulatory system. The branching strings of our insides made visible.

They look like nebulae. Spidery arms reaching from a cohesive center.

Their cycle. Endless death/rebirth. The apricot tree in my backyard is about to bloom. Watching the little fist-shaped buds is like waiting for a new life to start.

Winter trees are the best though. The dark, bone-like limbs rattling in the wind. Beautiful.

I’ve always wanted a tree house.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

When I was a kid my Grandmother had a group of apple trees and then a apricot and cherry tree. The biggest tree was this gigantic maple. The apple trees grew these wormy, bumpy apples that were inedible.

I would do ‘tree runs’ I would start at the back of the house and run and touch each trunk in order. Maple, apple, apple, cherry, apricot. Then back to the house.

Right before I started high school the trees were taken out. First the apricot and cherry. One died and the other was destroyed by gypsy moths. Then the apples, to make way for a shed. 

The maple still stands but is slowly giving in to age.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

I did a series of poems with titles and themes taken from native North American trees. Things like Hop Hornbeam, and Cherry Birch.

The poems deal with childhood and growing up. With death. The idea was to present a life cycle using a symbol of that life cycle.

I find the ‘youth’ of the USA to be interesting so there is a little of that thrown in there.

 —-

Michael J. Wilson lives in Santa Fe. His work has appeared in KNACK, Spittoon, Lungfull, and Shampoo. He  writes reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and works for a coffee roaster.

Go green and read Michael’s work here: gnashnosh.blogspot.com

 TREE INTERVIEW WITH JOE PAN                        Location: Mount Tremper Arts

Do you ever think about trees?

Quite often, actually. A more pressing question is, do trees think of me? & if so, what do they think? I believe we may share overarching political views. & a love for appendages.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

Too numerous to count, I’d reckon. But here are a few: as a child in Florida I remember being at my grandmother’s house & standing on a chair watching the advancing hurricane through a window. Everything was going sideways & the wind picked up trashcans & I watched in disbelief as across the street the wind picked up a pine tree & dragged it through a neighbor’s house. Another: My father built my younger brother & I a tree fort between two pines. I’ve written stories about this tree fort. Within its walls I cut my hand wide open with an X-acto knife, trying to make bows & arrows, & had to be rushed to the hospital. My father, holding onto a branch, fell out of the tree fort & thus became quite familiar with a chiropractor. Later on, after the divorce, my mother dismantled the tree fort & chopped the pines down & turned one into a sundial. The last memory I’ll share happened when I was a teenager. My friend had a truck & we were fond of driving the truck through the backwoods & occasionally into trees. This particular time I was standing up in the back of the truck quite ridiculously hammered, holding myself in place by gripping the open cab window & yelling loudly, when my friend decided to flip back on the lights just as we were approaching a rather small tree. The tree was clipped & leapt through the front windshield & we swerved wildly into several other small trees, for whom I had no pity, given what they had done to my father. We used the trees as kindling when we set fire to the truck.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

From where I sit & write in my house I can see a tree. It stands beside my radiator, surrounded by books (perhaps, even, an old friend). It is a small tree & it is dying. Each week a new leaf withers on its stem, turns brown, & peers toward the floorboards. I believe I can save it. I have to believe I can save it.

—-

Joe Pan grew up along the Space Coast of Florida, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, & currently serves as the Poetry Editor of Hyperallergic. His debut collection of poetry, Autobiomythography & Gallery, was named the Best First Book of the Year by Coldfront Magazine. His poetry has appeared in such places as Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, & Epiphany, his fiction in the Cimarron Review & Glimmer Train, & his nonfiction in The New York Times. Joe is the founder & managing editor of Brooklyn Arts Press, an independent publishing house, & lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

For more Joe Pan go green: http://joepan.org/

Tree Interview with Joe Fletcher                                     location: Mt Tremper Arts

Do you ever think about trees?

I do, and they know it. I remember reading a book (Jarry? Bataille? I’ll never find it.) in which the character or narrator despairs over his inability to make love to a tree. I think about that, and I think there is a way, and I think thought is when a chance wind spins the mirror shards strung from a spreading sycamore.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

In the woods behind my childhood home an oak had fallen into a swamp, yanking up with it a huge half-circle of roots and soil, leaving a gash in the ground at the swamp’s edge. After school, Yuri Minnick and I would get all jacked up on gas station junk food and go down there and climb around. We called it The Face of the Earth. It’s still there, disintegrating.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview? 

The oaks by that house on Germany Road in Williamston, Michigan, behind whose trunks I dreamt ape-like monsters stood, the fragrant mountain pines along the Clark Fork west of Missoula, Montana, through which massive buzzing power lines arced, the bare banyan tree splayed against a hot sky I glimpsed from a bus window outside of Dakar when I was sick, the magnolia in Sunderland, Massachusetts that decided to unfurl its leathery blossoms twice in one year, the two maples in Okemos, Michigan that I used as goalposts for several autumns, the pecan tree in Carrboro, North Carolina that weeps sap and spits nuts all over my backyard—these and other trees form a kind of Dunsinane of which I am composed. Also, some people down here call me The Ent.

 —-

Joe Fletcher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: Already It Is Dusk (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Sleigh Ride (Factory Hollow Press). Other work can be found in jubilat, Octopus, Slope, Puerto Del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hoboeye, Hollins Critic, and elsewhere. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Go green and read a Joe Fletcher poem:

Tree Interview with Elizabeth Clark Wessel          location: Mt Tremper Arts

Do you ever think about trees?

Yes. I think and talk about them. When I’m visiting my family we talk about the sick tree in my mother’s yard that needs to come down, and it’s like discussing the death of a beloved pet. When I was in grad school we talked about trees, how they move, and how that movement had something to with consciousness. I can’t remember the specifics, but it felt true and mind-blowing at the time. I also think about trees in connection with time. Like the vast majority of human beings, I love to see the trees turn green in the beginning of spring, and when they turn yellow in the fall it makes me a little sad.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

When I was maybe age 6 or 7, my best friend and I found a dead meadowlark on the road between our houses and gave it a sky burial in the branches of an old fat blue fir in her yard. I have a tactile memory of the bird (stiff, but soft) and tree (scratchy, but soft), and I have a very clear image in my mind of the bird’s yellow breast in the middle of the gray-green fir. I used to visit that particular tree for years afterwards. It felt sacred. I had all kinds of magical thinking about it. People were probably meant to worship trees.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Hmmm, well, my guilt and fear surrounding our imminent environmental apocalypse is related to trees, lack of trees, or disrespect for trees. As for my writing, the word “street” is five times as common in my poems as “tree”, but I do have a few poems with trees in them. I wrote one poem called Urville, which was inspired by the death of world’s oldest tree. I look out the window a lot when I’m writing, and what I’m looking at is the trees.

—-

Elizabeth Clark Wessel is an editor at Argos Books & Circumference: Poetry in Translation. Her poems and translations have appeared in DIAGRAM, A Public Space, Guernica, Sixth Finch, Lana Turner Journal, Jacket2, and The Laurel Review, among others. Her chapbook, Whither Weather, was chosen by Dana Levin for the Midwest Chapbook Series. She lives in Brooklyn and works as a translator.

Go green and read a poem by Elizabeth Clark Wessel: http://www.twoseriousladies.org/two-poems-by-elizabeth-clark-wessel

TWO INTERVIEWS BY TWO COACH HOUSE BOOKS POETS:::

Interview #1 Sarah Pinder

Do you ever think about trees?

I often wish I could be better at identifying tree species than I am. My father was a forester for a time, and now has a large plot of land he’s been planting trees on. Walking the property line with him is always a crash course in tree ID-ing. I’m envious of his ability to read his surroundings so clearly, and to see what’s being said about a space by what or how the trees are.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

One of my first jobs was working for a tree-planting company in my hometown over a summer, cleaning up the vehicles they used to transport people into the bush to plant trees. There could not be a dirtier job, I swear to God. I washed the vans out with a pressure washer, then would scrub them out with a wire bristle brush on my hands and knees, then hose them down again. Earth was embedded in every single crevice and crack of those vehicles. Earth and crumpled up porn and granola bar wrappers. Everything was held together with duct tape and axe handles.

Treeplanting is often a large part of how forests exist in a Canadian context, what with clearcut logging being a common practice. That job gave me the chance to dwell on the idea of forests sometimes being heavily constructed environments (when I wasn’t scraping sun-baked band-aids off the roofs of rental vans).

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

The romantic idea of a forest as a wild, untouched space was formative for me, but I also lived in single-industry towns relying on resource extraction for jobs. That sense of wildness existed alongside an understanding that what we call wild is often heavily mediated. I haven’t lived near or worked in the bush now for several years, but I still think and write about that tension a lot.

—

Sarah Pinder reads a poem: https://vimeo.com/47450758

Sarah Pinder lives in Toronto. Her first collection, Cutting Room, is

forthcoming with Coach House Books in Fall 2012. Her writing has been
shortlisted for the Expozine Small Press Awards and included in the
anthology She’s Shameless, and journals like Room, Canadian Woman
Studies and invisible city. A zine-maker of over a decade, you can
find her work in Montreal’s Distroboto art vending machines, as well
as a mailbox near you. http://bitsofstring.wordpress.com/

Interview #2 

Jonathan Ball

*

Do you ever think about trees?

I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by “trees.”

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

Again, I apologize, but I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I understand you wanted a picture of me touching something? I have a few of these weird things in my yard, so I touched one of those—it was scratchity. My father worked as a forester for a while but he quit when I was young and now he just cuts them down whenever he sees them. Every time he visits my house he cuts another one down. He never talks about them and won’t tell me why. I call them “Trevor Oscars” and they look funny and neat. This one has sourballs on it!

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview? 

My worldview involves many items and objects, but not these “trees” of which you speak. I would say that integral to my worldview, however, is the notion that the truth of the world is horror and violence lies inherent in everything humans do.Are trees involved in that?

Jonathan Ball (@jonathanballcom) is the author of Ex Machina, Clockfire, and The Politics of Knives.

—-

Jonathan Ball teaches English, film and writing at the University of Manitoba and the University of ­Winnipeg. He is the author of Ex Machina (BookThug, 2009) and Clockfire (Coach House Books, 2010), which was shortlisted for a Manitoba Book Award. Like his newest book The Politics of Knives (Coach House Books, 2012), these books were published under Creative Commons licences, so you can remix their ­contents. Visit Jonathan online at www.jonathanball.com. 

TREE INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW DURBIN                  location: Ditmas Park, Brooklyn

Do you ever think about trees?

Oh yes, all the time. I love to watch trees, especially online now that I live in New York City and so rarely see wild trees. I often Google “trees” because the results create the most beautiful, diverse forest in the world. And you can scroll for pages and pages. There’s a great subculture of people on YouTube who film the wind blowing through trees. I also like to watch those videos.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

There was a large tree in my backyard in Brooklyn that my neighbors cut down. It didn’t seem to be a problem tree, but they sent two men into my yard one day while my landlord was away and they cut it down. It took two days and on the second day I stuck my head out the window and asked them to stop, but they wouldn’t. I frantically Googled NYC tree laws, but they’re unfortunately lax. I filmed the men with my phone and told them what they were doing was wrong, but they didn’t listen. Then they just killed the tree. Is that too serious? Not all my memories of trees are sad: I remember these trees all the time, for example. 

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?  

Sometimes I think about trees and how I miss the freedom they create outside of urban and suburban landscapes. I used to live upstate and I used to like to walk through the woods and think. Trees are an aid to thinking. I can’t do that anymore unless I go to some nonurbanized space like Prospect Park or Central Park, but that’s fine. I try not to miss anything I’ve left behind. Since I like to Google trees, I’d say I’m very influenced by new media trees. They’re a forest you can never cut down. 

—

Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder, a publisher of art books, ephemera, pamphlets, and glossies. His writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Washington Square, West Wind Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor of Conjunctions and lives in New York City.

GO GREEN AND READ AN ANDREW DURBIN POEM: 

“From Reveler”: http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/durbin12.htm

TREE INTERVIEW WITH PAUL LEGAULT

Do you ever think about trees?

Most of my thoughts appear to me in the form of trees, though they’re not always thoughts about trees. ‘Hunger’ is an oak. ‘Love’ is a dogwood. ‘My internet isn’t working,’ is a gingko. The trees tell me what to do, populating my mind-forest with structures that prefer the animals who live inside of them — the way said trees live inside of me — to me, the future hibernating amongst us like a shaved bear painted to look like a birch. Both me and trees hate camouflage. We find wooden shoes immediately attractive and then, suddenly, are repulsed by them.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

If I weren’t Canadian, I could more fully embrace, and elaborate upon my experience with my national spirit-plant, the Maple. But instead I have to do so in an undisclosed manner, one that doesn’t become traitor to its impulse — to encounter each experience like a symbol of thought itself — lest someone claim a northern stereotype on my behalf, equating these majestic beings with the majestic beings of the NHL or the god of poutine herself. 

The Maple is a private act. I cannot go any further.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

—-

Paul Legault [Le-goh] is the co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books and the co-editor of The Sonnets: Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat/Telephone, 2012).He is the author of three books of poetry: The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011), and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, 2012).

Go Green and Read a Paul Legault poem: http://www.notnostrums.com/Legault.html

TREE INTERVIEW WITH LONELY CHRISTOPHER

Do you ever think about trees?

I don’t but for the sake of this question, as an exercise, I tried to think about trees. This is what came to mind: 

Where I grew up there were some large trees that reached out over the lake; I would climb them with girls. My father owned a business called the Magnolia Motel (because there was a single, white-barked magnolia tree in the gravel parking lot). My father also owned a tract of land that, at some time in the past, was used as a Christmas tree farm; the conifers had grown gigantic since the farm closed. Our family received copies of Forest Owner Magazine in the mail and to this day, truth be told, I find the idea of “the woods” to be more evocative and important than a single tree. In my hometown there was a bar called the Big Tree Inn because it had a very huge old tree behind it; the tree eventually died and fell on the bar. There is a tall tree in Prospect Park that reaches out over a pond; once I climbed that tree at night with Robert Snyderman and he fell off a branch and into the pond. Once I kissed Paul Legault under a tree in Fort Greene Park. He said, “You can kiss me if you want,” so I did. Then he said, “That was a mistake.”

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?

Trees, and the act of climbing trees, appear frequently in my poems but they are supposed to be metaphors for other things that aren’t trees, unrelated to trees. Here is a tree line I wrote: “you shall parse all obligatory relegations in the tree of my odd youth.” Here is the title poem from my next book Crush Dream:

I am the little Dutch boy

in the branch of a linden tree

Nobody loves me          I am

so lonely.

—-

Lonely Christopher wrote and directed the feature film MOM,  which premiered this summer. He is the author of a story collection titled The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse. His latest poetry chapbook, Crush Dream, will be a summer release from Radioactive Moat Press. He lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Go green and read a poem by Lonely Christopher:  http://www.radioactivemoat.com/lonely-christopher.html

Tree Interview with Nate Pritts

                                                   Location: Athen, GA

Do you ever think about trees?

I teach at a small college in Upstate New York. Every day I make my way to the same parking space, one that’s marked by a tree so that my car’s hood lines up dead center with the trunk.  It is a generic tree.  Standard issue bark.  The leaves, during seasons when there are leaves, are colored as you might expect them to be & are shaped in exactly the way everyone, from third grade on up, might draw them.  I am often thinking about trees, describing the landscape around me in terms of the quantity or quality of trees present, calculating my position in the larger landscape in relation to trees.  I don’t want to feel far from nature, I don’t want to be swallowed by fabricated concrete.  I don’t want to lose myself in the dull intentionality of constructed spaces.  I want proximity to something which at least hints at the uncontrolled, the vast, the mystery.

What is a vivid/significant memory you have involving a tree or trees?

I grew up in the suburbs & the most noteworthy aspect of the otherwise unremarkable house I grew up in was the massive Weeping Willow tree in our backyard.  It was all green & yellow & shade.  The fronds hung down like curtains & I was always enchanted by the way it created a space – a room – inside itself.  You could part the long slim branches & step into something. Summers, I’d take a chair & sit “in the tree,” underneath it, & read for hours – all morning, whole afternoons.  It was here I realized someone must have written the words I was reading – chosen them on purpose & set them down – to commune with me, to create some kind of connection.  I knew I wanted to do that too – for the other kids like me scattered & lost in their own neighborhoods, wishing someone knew how to talk to them.

Are trees involved at all in your writing or worldview?  

These days I don’t have much of a yard, just a weedy green square in back with a few overgrown tangles of rich vines.  Because of the awkward early 20^th century design of the house, none of the windows face there anyway.  The property next door, an industrial looking box which serves as a halfway house for kids transitioning out of juvie or too old to go to another in a series of foster homes, has a few trees growing in back though.  I can see those out my living room window from where I sit in my green chair.  I sit there & read for an hour or so every morning, maybe a few other stray hours throughout the day.  I read & sometimes I write, but I also spend a lot of time just looking out the window.  The most arresting – immediate?  necessary? – thing a person can see out the window is the ruined trunk of an old tree. But it looks fresh, as if it was only just hacked into, the wood bright & pulpy & damp.  I’ve never gone over for a closer look.  Starting at the ground & then maybe four full feet up the trunk it looks as if it’s been torn apart, shredded.  I suspect, these last few months, that all of my poetry has been about that tree, that trunk, the way it shines like an open wound, the way its machinery is exposed, the way the tree itself looks otherwise healthy, thriving despite this structural flaw. 

—-

Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing. A new chapbook, No Memorial, is forthcoming from THRUSH Press.  He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal & small press. Find him online at www.natepritts.com.

Go Green and read a Nate Pritt’s Poem: http://darkskymagazine.com/magazines/nate-pritts/