A big thank you to The Trumpeter for publishing this poem here (listen to it here).

This biopoetics may be a bit of a cop-out but there is a reason for it – promise!

This poem was the beginning. My first – ever – poem that combined science and poetry. What you see in this poem is something that desperately needs unpacking; something beautiful on its own, which gains additional power upon explanation. So why won’t I explain it?

I have. Acerum on Fomalhaut b was the inspiration for the following poems (with their biopoetics linked if available):

Acer saccharum

Dicotyledons

Deepnight

Sapriver

Budbreak

Windborne

Sunleaves

I: Seedling

I: Matured

And several additional poems in the sugar maple cycle, which were in turn inspired by the poems listed above.

It is important to note that I have been working on unpacking this poem since December of 2015, but have still only unpacked half of the poem in total. The left side of the poem tells the story of a bright planet in our screaming universe – Fomalhaut b.  This side weaves in and out of the right, the story of Acer saccharum – or the sugar maple tree. It is the sugar maple side of the story that I have had the chance to unpack and tell so far in my two years of working on this project. Admittedly, I may have gotten a bit stuck on the sugar maples…oops!

I hope that, reading this poem, you can appreciate the two threads as they come in and out of focus – the way our teeming, lively trees on earth can both parallel and juxtapose the vast emptiness of our universe, the way a planet, a star, or a tree is born, lives, or dies. And I hope the ever-growing web of poems that surrounds this smattering of words helps you appreciate those patterns in a poetic, and a scientific, way.

A big thank you to Palaver magazine for publishing this poem; you can read it here (pg 75) or hear me read it aloud here.

Deepnight is another poem in my sugar maple cycle; when I first began working on this poetry series and thinking about trees more deeply, I came to the conclusion that trees wouldn’t obey our seasons. So I created what I thought were important ‘seasons’ for trees: Sunleaves, Deepnight, Sapriver, Budbreak, and Windborne. Deepnight occurs after the trees shed all their leaves and enter a state of dormancy until the days become longer and warmer again.

While Sunleaves tells the story of the leaves on the trees changing color in fall, Deepnight tells of the tree settling into a period of barrenness, of the very beginning of winter. The story is told from the perspective of the leaves themselves: the sense of betrayal as they are tossed away so the tree can conserve resources (and not worry about the fragility of the leaves themselves) during the winter.

As the days gets shorter, less chlorophyll is produced in the leaves, allowing for the other colorful chemicals that were already there, such as anthocyanin (red) and carotenoids (orange), to be ‘uncovered’. The sap sent to the leaves to grow and sustain them is now instead sent to the roots, stored there throughout the winter to be used to power the next generation of leaves after Deepnight is over. Water concentration in the cells of the tree is reduced (increasing the concentration of solutes like glucose), in order to lower the temperature at which the cells will freeze through disrupting ice crystal formation.

Layers of abscission cells (often with modified, weaker cell walls) are formed where the leaf meets the branch of the tree; this means that, eventually, one hard gust of wind will knock the leaf off the branch.  Abscisic acid plays a role in endodormancy (a non-growing phase for a plant caused by conditions like cold, lack of light, etc) – though that role is currently poorly understood (originally, it was believed to play a role in abscission but scientists now believe it has some other function).

Some parts of the leaf will be actively broken down as the leaf slowly dies, its grasp on the tree being weakened by the abscission cells, until the tree is finally rid of all the leaves and enters dormancy, waiting for the days to grow longer again.

A huge thank you to Crab Fat Magazine for publishing this poem; you can read it here, see the form here, or listen to me read it here.

Windborne is another poem in my sugar maple cycle; when I first began working on this poetry series and thinking about trees more deeply, I came to the conclusion that trees wouldn’t obey our seasons. So I created what I thought were important ‘seasons’ for trees: Sunleaves, Deepnight, Sapriver, Budbreak, and Windborne. Windborne occurs as the trees begin to let loose their seeds (known as samaras, or helicopters), allowing for them to be carried on the wind across the land (this is known as anemochory).

In Budbreak, adult sugar maples that are at least 22 years old begin to produce leaves and flowers; these flowers cover the entire crown of the tree and contain both male and female parts. However, within a particular flower, only one sex will be functional – even though each tree will contain both sexes of flowers. Sugar maple pollen is carried by the wind from male to female flowers, fertilizing the ovules within the female flowers that will ripen into seeds over the next sixteen or so weeks. Each double samara (two wings) generally contains one seed which is ripe and ready when it turns a nice green color. Over the next two weeks, the ripened samaras will fall – leaving a pit in their coat, called the hilum, where they were once attached to the tree. The shape of the double samara and the size of the ‘wings’ allow samaras to be carried at least 100m!

Seeds are packed with their own food source (the endosperm) to help fuel the plant embryo’s growth. The embryo has several important parts – the plumule (rudimentary shoot), a radicle root that will emerge first upon germination to reach water through the leaf litter, and the first leaves, or cotyledons. In sugar maples (dicotyledons) there are two of them, which I wrote more about here in the Biopoetics for my poem “Dicotyledons”. Seeds typically have only a year to germinate before losing viability so it’s critical they land in a welcoming, wet environment. Seeds that are carried by the wind to extremely dry areas, rocks, or other inhospitable places will likely never germinate – which is why adult trees produce so many samaras. One year in Michigan, 8.56 million samaras/acre were recorded!

Check out the link of the photo, where the photographer has provided a few more maple seed facts in the description!

Main Source:

https://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/silvics_manual/volume_2/acer/saccharum.htm

I’m so thankful to Five 2 One magazine for publishing this poem; you can purchase the journal here, read my poem here, or listen to it: here.

Sapriver is another poem in my sugar maple cycle; when I first began working on this poetry series and thinking about trees more deeply, I came to the conclusion that trees wouldn’t obey our seasons. So I created what I thought were important ‘seasons’ for trees: Sunleaves, Deepnight, Sapriver, Budbreak, and Windborne. Sapriver occurs as the ground  begins to warm and winter (Deepnight) starts to fade into spring.

In fall, trees store sugars in their roots before losing their leaves and laying dormant through the short, cold days of winter. ABA, abscisic acid, helps the tree acclimate to the cold winter temperatures and be ‘frost ready‘ (entering a period of dormancy with fallen leaves, closed stomates, and other cellular changes).

During those winter days, sunlight can warm the cells just under the bark, causing them to expand. When night comes, the bark cools and contracts faster than the cells underneath, causing a vertical seam to split the bark open as it tightens over an expanded layer of cells. This heat stress can cause significant cell death and cracks in the barks of trees, sometimes called ‘frost cracks’ or ‘radial shakes’ (though there are also other causes of these wounds). Smaller trees can even die from these wounds, as they have fewer cell layers overall. This is just one challenge faced by trees due to weather conditions.

Longer days cause snow to melt, saturating the soil, and also raises ground temperature. The daytime heating of the ground causes sap stored in the roots (created through photosynthesis by leaves the tree lost in the fall) to also heat up; the sap expands due to the heating, creating pressure inside the finite space of the roots, causing some of the sap to flow up the trunk of the tree through the xylem. At night, when everything cools, there is now negative pressure in the roots – causing water to be pulled into the roots from the environment to equalize the pressure again. This sap and water is used by the tree to begin creating buds that will eventually become flowers and leaves, a process helped along by ‘gibberelins’  – hormones that stimulate stem elongation, breaking and budding, and seed germination after periods of dormancy (in response to cold).