Simple Tests

In his poem entitled "The Testing Tree," which he penned as an octogenarian, Stanley Kunitz writes of himself as a boy carefully choosing stones of just the right weight and size and aiming them at a tree whose might and constancy defines his place in the world and challenges and informs his notion of manhood. Recounting a recurring dream, which symbolizes the relentlessness of change, he calls up his long-dead mother and images of war. Finally, he closes, summing: "In a murderous time, the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and to not turn. I am looking for the trail. Where is my testing tree? Give me back my stones!"

I think of this poem often, particularly when I realize that the child I once was still lives within me and is more accessible than I sometimes remember. I tend to over-complicate things with mental gyrations, feeling challenged by the interconnectedness of everything. Sometimes it's hard to make a move, knowing that the ripples cast will span out well beyond the bounds of my perception. Dark times come, difficult things happen, and we wish to be returned to a time when tests were simply defined: can I hit this ancient oak tree, with every throw, at fifty paces? Making bargains with the tree: If I hit this one, I'll be kinder to my mother, more helpful to my sisters. Feeling the weight of the stones in your pocket but not knowing that this is the only weight you carry. The innocence, the simplicity, the honesty of childhood becomes a beacon as the body grows burdensome and the mind softens and everything intertwines with everything else. The wide-open, unquestionable courage of childhood calls to me, like Kunitz hears the trail, that tree, those stones. I don't want to go back. I want to stand here, in this time, imbued with the courage and clarity I felt sitting on the uppermost branch of the sycamore tree at the end of my driveway, watching the world unfold below me but knowing even then that I was a part of it all.