Among Winter Cranes

“Even as birds that winter on the Nile…” (Purgatorio XXIV.64)

The Quarterly of the Christian Poetics Initiative | Vol. 8 Issue 1 | Winter 2025

“Lean on a bough, and look back at it all”: Apples and Trees and Attention to the Created World

by Ben Egerton

Ben Egerton is a poet whose most recent collection is ‘The Seed Drill’ (Kelsay, 2023). He was visiting fellow and poet-in-residence at the Rivendell Institute at Yale during the Fall term, 2024, and is a scholar within the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts' Christian Poetics Initiative. He has previously held the Universities New Zealand Claude McCarthy fellowship. Ben teaches in the Faculty of Education at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

 
  My brother Sam and I were children in the 1970s and 80s. We were of the roaming generation; we grew up outside. And so, after school, at weekends, and during school holidays we’d be out in the fields, riding our bikes alongside the river Avon, or up trees. And only home when we were hungry or it was dark. Sam, eighteen months younger, was—still is—the much better tree climber. He’s at home in a tree. It’d take me an age to reach the relative safety of the lower branches. I never went higher because I was worried, not about falling, but about being unable to get down. Sam didn’t care. He knew if he’d got up, there’d be a way down.

*

  Trees do a lot for us. “I would almost say that they save me, and daily”, writes Mary Oliver.1 She’s perhaps articulating an almost universal sentiment. Trees shelter us, they feed us. “They give off such hints of gladness.”2 Trees provide medicine, give us something to write on and package things in, provide—in the form of viscose—material to make clothes. Trees act as shade, windbreak, and muffler. In winter we bring them inside and dress them, celebrate them. And we use them as fuel. Trees hold up hillsides, filter water, pump oxygen into the atmosphere, retain carbon dioxide. Each tree is a centre of and for its own ecosystem—and trees provide the metaphor to map our own families.

  Trees have been with us, as many creation myths tell us, right from the start. And palaeontologists Scott Lidgard and Alan Love note how many species of tree “display extraordinary levels of morphological stasis over geological time”.3 Seemingly ever present and unchanged, trees are contradictions: living fossils, current relics, metaphoric and literal, granted and taken for, spiritual and practical, vital but disappearing rapidly. You can’t see them for the wood.

*

  In ‘Appointment with Stillness’,4 the poet Abigail Carroll invites readers to “Stand in the company / of a tree”, to be “stunned / by a vast silence / redolent of apples and rain”, until in time “you will know yourself to be held / by what cannot be seen”. Her poem offers readers a guide in how to be attentive to the tree, to “concede” to the light coming through its branches, to notice how pressing against its bark leaves imprints in the skin. And in so doing, Carroll’s poem becomes a way in to meditate on tree-ness, its “shimmering truths”, as the poem puts it. It doesn’t matter that Carroll neither settles on a particular way to understand the poem’s tree nor guides us to read certain things into it—the poem is all the better for it. But in being in communion with it, observant, patient, the tree reveals itself, offers itself.

*

  With trees, for everything we see above, there’s more going on below. It’s easy to see how the concept of a ‘wood-wide web’,5 where tree roots touch and communicate and pass nutrients to each other, has caught both scientific and artistic imaginations. For all their tangible gifts, trees—and their places—offer a sense of O/otherness, of intangibility and tangledness. Wendell Berry describes it like this:

To walk in the woods, mindful only of the physical extent of it, is to go perhaps as owner, or knower, confident in one’s own history and of one’s own importance. But to go there, mindful as well of its temporal extent, of the age of it, and of all that led up to the present life of it, is to feel… one has come into the presence of mystery.6

*

  For followers of Christ, the tree is both central image of the faith and the structure upon which faith hangs; it is both tree and fruit of Eden. (Fruit which can’t have been an apple, for all sorts of geographical and botanical reasons, but has entered lore—sacred and cultural—as such). And because of such lore, I (perhaps we) see Tree(s) everywhere. Not just out there—gesturing vaguely to the window—but when I encounter a tree on the page or in a painting or in a gallery, somewhere it’s been deliberately framed by page or placement, I meet it—and Berry’s phrase is so helpful here—with “all that led to [its] present”. For me, perhaps others too, that “all” includes a biblical understanding of what has led to the tree’s present and presence.

*

  But not everyone does. On my regular running playlist is the podcast Talk Art—where actor Robert Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament interview artists. I enjoyed their recent conversation with the Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio.7

  Gallaccio is a sculptor and installation artist, working primarily with freshly cut flowers and fruits, and newly felled trees. The conversation I listened to coincided with her latest exhibition at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, England.8 This exhibition, like all of hers, while also exploring new thinking and displaying new work, returns to her same pieces. Because she works with fresh organic material—which tends towards rotting—her work is more entropy than Midgard and Love’s morphological stasis. Yet each (de)composition is simultaneously recreation of previous work, continuation and deterioration of current work, and is the same work. (I think to misquote Heraclitus here: you can never view the same Gallaccio work twice.)

  This past/present/continuation is reflected in the dating of each piece: 1,700 fresh red gerberas held between panels of glass, as an almost-living/almost-dying still life, is a work called ‘Preserve ‘Beauty’’ (1991-2024); ‘Falling From Grace’ (2000-2024) consists of 1,200 apples beaded onto ceiling-to-floor ropes like a giant sideways abacus, or a veil; ‘The Inner Space Within’ (2008-2024) is a whole ash tree, including its crown, segmented to fit the gallery space. Over the course of the exhibition, the organic matter spoils, the tree gives up its biotics, the gallery is filled with a co-mingled fragrance of life and death.

*

  Sam has had three weddings, and he’s awaiting his fourth. All to the same person. The first was a brief civil ceremony; the other two were held, as will the yet uncelebrated fourth, to appease (sorry, to include) family in different parts of the world. For two of those weddings I had the deep honour of being Sam’s best man. And I’m holding out to still be first pick should the fourth ceremony ever go ahead.

  In my speech I wished to convey something of how at home Sam is up a tree. Never content with perching in the lower branches, how he’d always go to the very top, and poke his head out as a sailor might from a crow’s nest. I concluded with this short poem:

For trees are what you know.
              Their height
never frightens you. Even at eight you’re assured
uppermost branches will accept your weight,
so you lose yourself in the crowd of one,
in the crown of leaves, finger-read centuries-
old bark, deliberate with deciduous
elders, and drop your coat because you’re hot
and at home.
       The neighbour catches
sight and, concerned you’ve fallen, phones Grandma.
Everyone rushes down the garden to check.
At first you’re oblivious, then grow indignant
when we ask if you’re okay out on your limb,
that we’d doubt your ability to grasp it.

  In writing this, I made a conscious decision to evoke Jesus at the temple, after he’d given his parents the slip at Passover. As with Sam up a tree, I’ve always detected a (righteous) indignance to Jesus’ response to his parents’ worry: “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”9

*

  Gallaccio is often asked about resonances in her work. Why does she keep returning to apples and trees? In the Talk Art interview, Gallaccio explains how her apples evoke technology, fashion brands, the myth of perfection, climate change, poverty, access to healthy food; apple as quotidian, domestic, the opposite of exotic; apple “is a potent symbol”.10 In an interview with Frieze, Gallaccio was questioned about her tree and tree-ring design for the national HIV/AIDS memorial in London. Gallaccio responded by describing trees as “a symbol of life and longevity”. The interviewer prompts Gallaccio:

Interviewer: They’re repositories of knowledge.
Gallaccio: Trees are so important in cultures worldwide; there’s so much symbolism there. My logic was to create a huge tree that will take up as much space as I can on that side of the crescent. I’ve removed some rings that will sit alone, upturned, to stand in for those lost generations. I call it a ‘halo’. In a way, it’s this section that looks like a monument. The trunk will be very low to the ground and might not be visible from a distance.11

*

  It’s 2024. I’m spending Fall in New Haven. Normally, Fall is autumn. And I spend it, March to May, in Wellington, New Zealand, where I live, write, run, and teach. Instead, I’ve watched squirrels (we don’t have squirrels) laying up treasures for their hibernation heaven. I’ve watched trees resist, hold out in tenacious verdancy for as long as possible. I’ve watched and heard bluejays persevere. But Fall is inevitable. First it’s one spot, a stain of red, like the tiniest vitiligo spot on the uppermost leaves; a spot that soon spreads and grows within and beyond the trees to the birds, to the squirrels, to the sun itself. And as I run through the leaves and trees I love up to the top of East Rock, I think of the same “oaks that swerve up East Rock Park”12 of Danielle Chapman’s poem ‘Leaving Boston Again’, how their “insouciance” provides a hope-filled counterpoint to the poem’s background of cancer appointments. How someone else is paying the same close attention I am. How close attention in real life becomes close attention on the page.

*

  Listening to the descriptions of Gallaccio’s work in the Talk Art conversation and looking at her work online, I’m struck by how Christian it is. It doesn’t require lengthy exegesis to argue for the poetics of this. The Edenic, Fall imagery of the apple; collocation of Eden and redemption in the tree; blood red of gerberas and apples evoking Christ’s blood; the names of the works; “tree as knowledge”; tree as ‘halo’; the constant renewing of the imagery—like an offering, a sacrifice—a process that reminds me of David Jones’s dictum: the role of the artist is “to use a current notion to express a permanent mythus”.13

*

  Perhaps nowhere in all of Western literature is arboreal theology most prominent and poetic than in Dream of the Rood. In this anonymous medieval poem, the Christ’s death is narrated by the tree selected to crucify Him on:

I was cut down at the copse's end,
Moved from my root. Strong enemies there took me,
Told me to hold aloft their criminals,
Made me a spectacle. Men carried me
Upon their shoulders, set me on a hill,
A host of enemies there fastened me.
And then I saw the Lord of all mankind
Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount
Upon me.14

*

  But listening to Gallaccio’s descriptions of her own work, I’m struck by the seeming absence of any kind of recognition from her that her works echo Christianity or sacramentality. In the exhaustive list Gallaccio offers for why apples and trees, they appear to be doing all sorts of things other than evoking Christianity.

*

  Gallaccio’s work is concerned with the tree and apple of industry and agriculture, of climate and pandemic, of life and death. Image and object seemingly and deliberately stripped of Christian connotation. But look closer. Sit with the crown of the ash tree—as Carroll’s poem guides us to—look behind the veil of apples—as ‘Fall from Grace’ encourages us to—and we realise these trees and apples are still, in some senses, grafted onto, or cuttings from, the apple and T/tree of a world, a time, a state, a creation beyond and behind and ahead of ours. Titles guide us, gentle imperatives bid us; with all other possible explanations verbalised and exhausted, the unsaid is the only possible thing for the viewer to bring, and is the space for the viewer to enter into.

*

  And I think this is what the opening lines of Michael Symmons Roberts’s poem ‘Rare Sighting’,15 are describing; this possibility of re-entry into and re-understanding of all-too-familiar symbols:

  Because the crab apple tree is not incarnate,
  but a shape cut from sky, you simply pull
  its trunk a little wider and step through.

  Once on the other side, you turn, take stock,
  lean on a bough, and look back at it all.

What is the “all” we might be looking at?

                you hold
  your breath to catch yourself, out of the bath,
  pausing naked at the window, staring back.

Us: cleansed, sanctified, re-birthed.

  And Robert Hass, too, in his extraordinary poem ‘The Apple Trees at Olema’.16 The poem is set in spring, and it evokes both Eden and Calvary in its meditation on “two old neglected apple trees” upon which “was the repetitive torn flesh / of appetite in the cold white blossom” catching both imagination and attention of the poem’s protagonists. Spring is Easter-time in the northern hemisphere.

*

  It’s easy for me to ‘tut’ at Gallaccio and sound concerned about her lack of acknowledgement of Christian resonance in image and sign in her work. Or shake my head sadly that Christianity has been rinsed out. But to do that, I think, would be to miss the point.

  Because, of course, not every tree in a poem or a gallery is the Cross of Christ. Not every apple in a poem registers the Fall. But reading a poem or viewing installation work with those connotations in mind encourages—invites—closer, Godly, attention. It offers enticing entry points. We look. We listen. We ask. And we can sit, as Symmons Roberts says in another poem of his, under “a lavish tree and eat”.17

*

  I bring my Christian attention to Gallaccio’s art and to Hass, Berry, Carroll, Oliver, and Symmons Roberts—and countless works by other artists and poets. Does it matter if the poet or artist is using an image Christianly or not? I don’t think so. What matters is the act of attention—the poet’s and mine—and an unspoken distinction and dialogue between those discrete, but imbricated, acts. For example: Gallaccio is clear that she is bringing ecological issues into view. There’s a (Christian) response to that. She is clear she is bringing HIV/AIDS into view. There’s a (Christian) response to that. She is raising questions of how good food is accessible. There’s a (Christian) obligation to respond to that.

  Close reading of literature and close looking at art through the lens of Christ compels us to respond. Close reading and close looking theologically—understanding the implications of the images; Berry’s “all that has led up to the present life of it”—bring those responses into sharper relief still. Abram van Engen similarly collocates attentiveness to faith, attentiveness to language and attentiveness to nature with the desire to do something about it. In considering a Christian poetics, he reminds us that texts live and operate in the present—by which I take to mean that reading a text biblically in some way invites me to respond biblically not (just) to the text but to the present in which the texts operate. But this is no didacticism of attentiveness. For, as Van Engen writes, “a Christian poetics combines [a] sense of wonder with an emphasis on care. It asks how awe and action relate.”18

*

  It’s always hard to know exactly where ideas come from. For me, the ‘Jesus at the temple as a boy’ episode arrived because my brother was up an apple tree. But I also saw my brother in the temple—where else?; held aloft on the arms on/of the Cross; communing with apples in a prelapsarian image. Sam in Paradise. Simile, metaphor, reality.

  What began as a poem for a wedding speech is now in poetry nursery. It’s being reverse-cultivated, genetically modified. It’s not my typical poem-writing method. Mostly I start with a line or an idea and see where it goes. Knowing the end before the beginning might work for Isaiah,19 but it makes for a poor poem, and it makes for a lack of noticing. To have the end—a disgruntled brother up a tree—I have to figure out how to get there, how to plant the seeds, as it were, throughout the poem to earn the (non-contrived) ending. Or it might just stay as it is—an occasional poem.

*

  Berry again: “If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes”.20

*

  I might be going out on a limb here. For me, the Christian imagination does not begin and end on page or in a gallery. It’s not just reading a poem or seeing a piece of art and recognising certain elements as gesturing towards Christianity, or even responding to apples or trees (or whatever other resonances of faith we notice) as Christian images. It’s what we do next that counts. It’s what we do when we see our world from the poem or piece, and how we re-enter this world—like looking back from the tree in ‘Rare Sighting’. It’s about being at home in the tree and seeing and tending to the T/tree in our home. How, then, might such wonder, attention, and care we give words about creation be reflected in how we attend to creation?

 

Ben Egerton

Program Director and Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington
Associate Fellow, Rivendell Institute at Yale University
ben.egerton@vuw.ac.nz

1 Mary Oliver, ‘When I am Among the Trees’, Thirst: Poems (Beacon Press, 2007), 4.
2 Ibid.
3 Scott Midgard and Alan Love, ‘Rethinking Living Fossils’, BioScience 68, no. 10 (2018): 760–70. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biy084
4 Abigail Carroll, Cup My Days Like Water (Wipf and Stock, 2023), 18.
5 See, for example: Christopher Rhodes, ‘The Whispering World of Plants: 'The Wood Wide Web’’, Science Progress 100, no. 3 (2017), https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10365201/
6 Wendell Berry, ‘A Native Hill’, The World-Ending Fire (Penguin, 2018), 29.
7 Russell Tovey and Robert Diament, ‘Anya Gallaccio’, Talk Art , season 23, episode 10 (2024) https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/anya-gallaccio/id1439567112?i=1000676192808
8 Anya Gallaccio, Preserve, Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK), Sept 2024-Sept 2025, https://turnercontemporary.org/whats-on/anya-gallaccio-preserve/
9 Luke 2:49.
10 Interview with Anya Gallaccio, Turner Contemporary, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVBG0YqoJig
11 Evan Moffitt, ‘Anya Gallaccio on the London AIDS Memorial: ‘It’s Really Important, a Big Deal’, Frieze (27 June 2024), https://www.frieze.com/article/anya-gallaccio-london-aids-memorial-interview-2024
12 Danielle Chapman, ‘Leaving Boston Again’, Boxed Juice (Unbound Edition Press, 2024), 32.
13 David Jones, The Anathemata, (Faber, 1952), 82.
14 There are various versions of The Dream of the Rood. My preference is Richard Hamer’s 1970 translation, republished in 2015 (in A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (Faber and Faber, 2015)) and available at english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/rood/translations/hamer.html. The excerpt here is lines 31-39.
15 Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘Rare Sighting’, Image, issue 75 (2012), https://imagejournal.org/article/rare-sighting/
16 Robert Hass, ‘The Apple Trees at Olema’, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010, 162.
17 Symmons Roberts, ‘The Tourists’, Drysalter (Cape, 2013), 24.
18 Abram Van Engen, ‘Wonder and Care: A Christian Poetics for the Present Day’, Christianity & Literature, Volume 71, Number 4, (December 2022), 513-521, https://doi.org/10.1353/chy.2022.0052
19 Isaiah 46:10.
20 Berry, ‘Think Little’, World-Ending Fire (Penguin, 2018), 57.

 
 

Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library. “Momoyogusa = Flowers of a Hundred Generations.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1909. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-cb13-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Dante Aligheri. The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Dell, 2004.


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