Carmen Germain
Carmen Germain is a painter and poet. She is the author of three poetry collections, the latest being Life Drawing (MoonPath Press 2022). While on sabbatical, she was a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.
Certain spruce trees are used to make violins,
others left where if they make a sound,
it’s a growl when wind comes down
the mountain, how they creak leaning
into each other in the canopy.
But this peculiar spruce in our woods—
no music in the gnarled trunk,
branches like a bulwark.
For years I watched its contorted
growth, something alpine among
the common crowd of lowland green
until one summer without rain
the cambium dried up.
growth, something alpine among
the common crowd of lowland green
until one summer without rain
the cambium dried up.
The man who digs a trench for us
says some trees school marm
growing in river-run gravel
of this valley. He’s right about the one
I see from this window. It never crowned,
thrusts branches thick as the trunk.
I wonder about men who see a tree,
give it the name for a woman who
taught children in former days
and did not marry, how they thought
of her as stunted. I think how
Daphne became a tree to escape Apollo,
how a certain spruce becomes a violin.
