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Tree of Crows

Tama Baldwin

Out of the ash
     I rise with my red hair
     And I eat men like air.
               -- Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazurus" Ariel," October, 1962

Who is stronger than hope? Death.
Who is stronger than the will? Death.
Stronger than love?       Death.
Stronger than life?            Death.
But who is stronger than death?       Me, evidently.
 
Pass, Crow.
          -- Ted Hughes," Examination at the Womb Door," Crow, 1971

     It was a peculiarly warm Sunday afternoon in November, the air pumped full of the wine of late fall, smoke and damp leaves. I was walking past the college green with a copy of Ted Hughes' book, Crow, in my hands. I was on my way to my Judo teacher's house to return it. Peter was British and wanted me to read the better contemporaries of his homeland. It seemed to him I was reading too many books written by Americans. This from a man who, in one of our first lessons after demonstrating a proper bow, taught me to carry him on my back. The dead man carry, I think the move is called.
     Peter had given me Crow the week after the literary Halloween party we had both attended. I had gone as Plath--a brassy move, I'll admit, given her astonishing poems, her meticulous prose style. I was careless then. I thought the idea fun. I imagined perhaps a Plath could go home with a Hemingway--her kind of guy. I had found a toy oven at the Salvation Army store. It was one of those metal EZ-bake replicas meant to teach a girl her proper place. Using a soldering iron and a hammer I bashed the bottom out and fitted it upon my shoulders. The open door served as both potential mask and drink holder. Peter, as I recall, was Shakespeare. His ruff was a masterpiece of handiwork by his novelist wife.
     What Peter didn't fully understand was the nature of my devotion to Sylvia Plath at the time. I had already joined Plath's Wrath League, the millions of American women indignant with Hughes' decision to burn several of her journals upon the event of her suicide, selecting (we assumed) the entries that indicted him in her death.
     There was just one problem. The poems I carried in my hands were good, and I knew it. The absurd question of who was the better poet--a problem all literary couples face--became more difficult to answer. After her suicide, Hughes became his wife's executor, her editor, the defender of her posthumous career. He was the one to assemble and publish the poems she had written in the months and weeks and days before she finally killed herself. Ariel records a light not meant for mortal eyes, the vision of a woman come back from death's edge to do a good bit more than tell us all. This Lazarus is no lady. There is the voice of the poetic avenger in her last poems, a desperate hunger for art to matter. Crow, on the other hand, is all about aftermath. There was the funeral, the sorting, the burning, the editing, the girlfriend, the mother-in-law, the two motherless infants. The poet in these poems has become the inquisitor, the muse, the interlocutor of the world's only creature spared by death--Crow himself.
     Crow glared at me from the laid, buff cover of the book. He had become corrupted by his invincibility. He could be choked, clubbed, impaled, dragged, and drowned, and still he would rise to feed on the death that abounded in the nature he dominated. This amazed and enraged me as I thought of Hughes' dead wife. Screw you Hughes, is what I wanted to say. Screw you and your problems with intimacy, your trouble bearing the responsibility of toddlers and a genius for a wife. You left her with your two children and not enough heat during one of the coldest winters on record in London while you were warming your balls in Ireland with somebody else.
     I was a block from Peter's house when the event I want to relate occurred. He had invited me for coffee. The children were away at boarding school, his wife working on her novel in their cabin in the country. This is probably the point in the story when I should remind you that what I am about to describe is as exact an account of what happened as could be wrought in words--never a perfect affair, I'll grant, but it would please me if you would believe me. I had to pass under a railroad bridge that had fallen into disuse. It was a rickety assemblage of iron and concrete and weeds. It was hard to imagine that such a construction had ever appeared to be the cutting edge of technology. The air under the trestle was cold. I was wondering if the dead care about books that are written after their time here on earth. I was wondering if ghosts of authors can feel our minds reading their words. I was wondering if, when she knelt in the kitchen and turned on the gas, she had meant to die or merely had hoped to bring her husband home.
     I had reached the other side of the underpass--my body half in the shade of the bridge, half in the sun. The sound of air expelled from lungs struck me first. It was as if a swimmer too long under water had burst to the surface. Claws dug into my shoulders. I felt the blade of a beak strike the back of my neck. It was at the exact moment I heard a shriek that my brain--running a frantic search to name what exactly it was that had attacked me--located the word crow. The bird, tangled in my hair, was furious, its black wings slicing the edges of my sight.
     It is not often in a life that one has the inclination or the opportunity to punch a bird, but that is exactly what I did--one hand holding the book and the other frantically flinging at my head. The crow dropped to the pavement behind me. I whirled around to face it. I swear to you, when I turned to confront what had attacked me, that bird stood its ground against me, its body stout and black as a bible, its voice unrelenting, its eyes an ice-shocked blue.

     I learned from my encounter with the crow to be cautious both about what I read and what I think about what I read. I learned that the text--no matter how apparently true to the author's life--is separate from that life. Readers should instead have some concern for how the writing is about their own circumstances. I learned to stop judging Hughes. I learned to fear Plath.
     I was flipping through a catalogue from the Louvre the other day and stopped, wholly by accident, at a 19th century painting by the German Romanticist, Caspar Friedrich. "The Tree of Crows," we are told, is painted in full consciousness of all the heroes whose fallen bodies formed that tumulus since pagan times, the tree itself growing out of the graves of Huns.

     The narrative of this story formed as a whole in my imagination in the very moment I turned the page and my eyes focused on this landscape. The only human presence here is the witnessing eye of the painter, an artist alone in a place of desolation. We are told that scholars have determined the chalky cliffs in the distance are those of the painter's childhood home, but I find this statement disconcerting because this landscape reminds me of my own home. It is as much of Iowa as it is Germany, as Midwestern as Baltic. We are told that the light on the horizon signifies the hope of eternal life, but I have my doubts about that too. The yellow of the sky is sallow, the washed jaundice of malnutrition. The crows are floating away from their congress in the tree into the sky beyond the edges of the painting, beyond the realm of the seen. In the foreground they are sleek and fat as dogs. By the time they reach the horizon they are thin and black, malicious seeds, metastatic, dark thoughts traveling the channels of the mind. The naiveté of the interpretation provided in the catalogue makes me suspect, suddenly, that Romanticism is an invention of the Modern mind, all those bachelor scholars looking wistfully from their godless times upon a landscape they hoped others had infused with God. Empires rise and burn in the name of civilization, every generation deluded by the sentimental and righteous notion of its own progress.
     Ashes and bluish-yellow smoke are swirling past the windows as I write. I need to break to see if it is my own home that is burning.

     Ted Hughes died recently. For the longest time I had simply forgotten about him--except during his brief attempts to visit America, an effort always marred by the hatred of American women. Plath's last book, still in print now longer than she lived--35 years after her death--has largely detached itself from the myth of her marriage, but Hughes' career never completely did. Before her death, she was quickly becoming Mrs. Ted Hughes. Afterward, he spent a significant portion of his career as Mr. Sylvia Plath. Maybe the problem is simply that he lived. How many poets have done their best work in the anger of their youth only to settle into the mediocrity that a long life seems to require? Legends are supposed to die at the peak of their power. Keats, for example, had he not died in his twenties might well have turned from the unsustainable ecstasy of poetry, opting for life as the local apothecary. We never try to conceive of such men as husbands and fathers. Was it fear of mediocrity that drove Rimbaud away from writing poetry at the age of twenty? Was Hart Crane's decision to step off the back of a luxury liner into the Caribbean merely a form of lyrical closure? What thwarted poets are currently serving as senior greeters at Walmart? Who knows what banality Plath would have produced if allowed the time to recover from a passionate youth, if given room to write and publish in a slightly less sexist world, if provided an accurate diagnosis and the psycho-chemical neutrality of what is otherwise known as an adequate treatment. Lives become the stories of contingencies.
     Days and months and years pass, time leaving its impression on the body. I bear more marks than I should for my age--my skin tells an unconditional story, the story of needles, knives, and flames. Long hours in hospitals. Longer hours spent studying the scars in the mirror. When you are visibly marred you learn that human beings fall into two classes: The Repulsed, who tell themselves they are being polite by not asking what happened to you, and then there are The Titillated, who hope that perhaps they can save themselves a similar fate by inquiring and at the same time in obtaining that information can cop a high, your suffering a source of strange pleasure. I tend to fall into the latter class myself so I found it amusing to concoct lies for the morbidly curious. My left arm is particularly mangled and this has lead to intimate conversations with strangers.
     When the biker in the gas station in Alberta asked what happened to my arm, I gave him a lecture about the dangers of tequila binges and the proper handling of weed-whackers. The Mormons, grabbing tuna melts in the roadside bar/casino in Livingston, Montana, were disinclined to continue their proselytizing when I told them my scar was a god-bite. In Des Moines, while waiting bar for the over-45-pressed-shirt-and-tie crowd, I explained (invariably I was asked) that the mouth-sized pit in my left forearm is where I bit myself when Reagan got elected a second time. That one doesn't work any more. Now, Reagan's old news. Nobody cares about how the Gip had the better part of the nation bending over to take it in the ass: Savings and Loan (which end of that equation are you on?) Iran Contra. The systematic eradication of personal liberties. The erosion of labor unions. . . . Nobody cares. Even Nixon's now something of a hero to network television despite recent revelations of wife-beating and drug abuse.
     I had been mauled in the name of medicine--this anyone could see when looking at my bare arm and the zippered scar that pursed like a mouth. Unzip those lips, who knows what would come out of them? As it healed it became clear something was wrong with the wound. It became more labial, like a handy vagina I wore on my arm--a man I was drinking with was kind enough to point this out as he asked permission to kiss it. The doctors, earnest in their white robes, decided upon a treatment that involved setting the wound on fire--which they did six times, each time without anesthesia. There was a reason for this: they judged just how much fire my flesh needed by my level of pain. The dosage was equal to my tolerance for suffering.
     My last day of treatment was the day I passed out and woke to find my arm charred and bleeding. It wasn't the pain that pushed me away from consciousness--it was the smell of my own flesh burning. This is something that only the very unlucky know: heretics and witches, cancer patients, inhabitants of the burn unit, lower caste widows. It is the twenty-first century since the beginning of the Christian Empire, and we are still burning the living every day.

     Hospitals are amazing. They can set you on fire and send you on your way within the hour. Exhausted, my lover gone away, I'd intended to drive myself home for an early night, but I accelerated past the house and out of town. I drove along the river and into the country. It was late in the day. I hiked through a pasture toward a crown of land thick with trees. I'd sat there at sunset many times. It was the highest point for miles, and I could see everything it seemed. The view, once a spectacular expanse of prairie, was quickly being ruined. New sub-divisions--every house the same crude geometry, the same mousy colors--were spreading rapidly across the hills to the boundaries of the reservoir. A bumper crop of information age employees has been bred to live their lives of indebtedness in them. There was now a plastics factory and its acres of bins filled with red and yellow toys. The super highway five miles away glimmered, a radiant vein, families driving the grid of their lives north and south. I could even see the water tower with the town’s name in ominous 400,000 point helvetica: Liberty. I wonder what the founders would think of that name now. I wonder if this expansion is what they had in mind when they defended freedom and named this town and many like it for their sacrifice.
     I settled under a two-story oak that had to be at least a century and a half old. Its canopy extended over a large mound of earth that had been identified as a burial site for aboriginal tribes who had lived here 3,000 years before. This hill was the logical choice for locating a religious ceremony. At dawn, the sun seemed to rise straight from the grave--as if by the will of the ancestors there would be the grace of the day. And at dusk, the sun appeared to be cast from this hill, an arc of light lobbed into the horizon carrying with it the heart of an entire tribe.
     I lay down on a bed of leaves, my injured arm throbbing under bandages. A band of horses grazing nearby kept an eye on me in the diminishing light. They were always wary. Their species had survived the last 50 million years. I was the anomaly in the landscape, a point of danger. They wore bodies of caution. Their bodies were one body. What one saw, they all saw. This is never more evident than when they are running, their unity is breathtaking. As they gallop across the field--thousands of pounds of power moving in synchrony--it is as if the invisible truth of the universe is suddenly made visible. It is like watching the design of a wave as it curves back into itself just as it reaches shore. It is like witnessing the choreography of fire. In such moments you feel as if the sun suddenly has a body you could touch--if only you would let yourself. These horses will be here for millions of years beyond the last of my own kind.

     On February 11, 1963 Plath placed mugs of milk by her children's cradles, and then carefully stuffed towels under the door of the kitchen so the gas would not escape. She ceased looking at life from death's edge and crossed over, no longer lover, no longer mother, leaving even her poems behind.
     It is too easy to romanticize the suicide. Death is always a fantasy until it arrives with its black bag of pills and tools. Afraid of dying, I spent years studying it--in the corridors of hospitals and in the library. I contemplated in search of a complacency enjoyed by almost everyone else. I wanted to feel again the stupidity of happiness, to live if ever so briefly without the panic that follows really knowing one's own mortality. Lying under the tree that afternoon, I thought that I'd like to die in such a place, peaceful but for moderate pain, alone but for the quiet watchfulness of horses. A sentimental death. A simple death. A death without struggle. I dreamt of a death like sleep because I knew that in the end there will be nothing of the kind for me.
     When I awoke I could not see. I felt trapped in a capsule of air that was thick and black. It was as if I'd been blinded and buried alive. Then I realized the darkness was moving, that it had a body. I listened carefully, it had wings. The tree was moving. The first crow called, answered by a second, and then a third. Soon the whole tree was answering. I'd fallen asleep, bereft, my flesh still burning, and had awoken beneath a murder of crows. I found myself hoping this was a lucid dream--one of the many I'd had since surgery--and that it was still day--that the light had been obscured by the bodies of the birds, that all I had to do to see was learn to love without expectation--which is in and of itself an acceptance of death--that if I could die my way into each and every moment of my life the crows would part and I could see again, my vision restored after years of failing to forgive everything.
     Maybe the crows were a dream--but I do have a long scar marking my left forearm. Plath and Hughes were poets, and it is their work only that is given to the public. Ted and Sylvia were just a couple working out the convolutions of power and pain that are love, love whose interpretation insists on privacy. My own lover--absent through so many of those terrible years--came back eventually, bearing gifts of wine and words and light.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.