Poetry: All forms & styles|Prose Poetry||Kathryn Dohrmann|"ALLÉE"

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Kathryn Dohrmann

ALLÉE

—After Beth Moon’s photograph, Avenue of Oaks

All art is a magic operation, or, if you prefer, a prayer for a new image.
Charles Simic

i

A small town, an old-fashioned thunderstorm, witnessed from inside the house on Hazel. Suddenly, lightning rolls down the street. Not a bolt, but a ball, round, jagged, like the blade of a circular saw.

A storm door frames the girl watching the lightning as it tumbles by. Herself watching herself. The house interior is dark, though the lamp in her father’s study trembles. She stands her ground. Prays that she keeps some lightning for later, for all the days of her long life, for times when she will need it.

ii

At the end of the American Civil War, her great-grandfather left the coast of the Frisian Sea and came to a new town in Iowa.  There was land to be had, scoured of prairie peoples and plants, a canvas painted over.  The street plan, rooted in right angles, appealed to his mason’s sensibilities.

Numbered streets ran east-west. Named streets,  north-south: Birch, Hickory, Cedar, Olive, Oak, and so on. Chestnut defined the center. On each side of every street a parkway planted with elms. Elm allées. These led down steep hills to the river, the Nishnabotna, which is where, a century later, her lightning ball would roll.

iii

By the time the girl is grown, the elms have achieved their characteristically graceful, vase-shaped canopies, branches touching side-by-side, reaching over the street. More than one hundred years old, more than one hundred feet tall. The elms are to the town as the courthouse, library, bank.

Elms frame the girl as she leaves for the city. Like a slow-moving storm, Dutch elm fungus arrives, crossing the Atlantic when an Ohio furniture maker imports some logs. The disease is one these elms do not know. The town bereft, burning in the sun. The prairie lifts its head, sniffs the wind.

The girl does not return, but always, when there are thunderstorms, she imagines the lightning ball and her elms.

iv

An allée is an avenue is an aisle is an illusion. Elm allées are no more, but one can get a sense of them from Avenue of Oaks. Southern live oaks. Their converging lines distort perception, and in the distance the avenue appears to narrow. The eye is drawn to the vanishing point. The allée is shadow, silence, reverie.

The Avenue oaks lead us from the Big House—centerpiece of Oak Alley Plantation—to the Mississippi River. Far upstream, in the middle waters of the continent, the girl’s river, the Nishnabotna, and the mother river, the Mississippi, inevitably become one.

v

Of trees, Wendell Berry writes: their life’s a benediction made, and is a benediction said, over the living and the dead.

Benediction. Even allée elms, imposed on a not-blank slate. Even avenue oaks, planted and tended by the enslaved.

Still, we must pray for better. The girl is running to the vanishing point, toward lightning.

____________________
Notes:
The epigraph is from Charles Simic’s prose poem, “A Force Illegible.” Dime-Store Alchemy, The Art of Joseph Cornell, New York Review of Books, 1992.
Reference in the final stanza is from Wendell Berry’s seven years of tree sabbaths, three lines of an untitled poem that begins “slowly, slowly, they return.”  Sabbaths, North Point Press, 1987.

About the writer:
Kathryn Dohrmann has taught for many years in both the Psychology and Environmental Studies Departments at Lake Forest College. Her poems have been published in CALYX, the Chicago Tribune, The A-3 Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and others. A finalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic and WBEZ poet laureate competitions, she was also a participant in the Poetic Dialogue Project; her poems from that project–The Pandora Memos–have been anthologized in Collaborative Vision and All About Eve.

Image: Avenue of Oaks by Beth Moon (Contemporary). Fine art photograph published in her collection, Ancient Trees, Portraits of Time (Abbeville Press 2014). By permission.

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