Altered Axis

Amy Boyd

Five years into decay, the hickory topples,
becomes an altered axis in the forest,
dislodging the branches of others,
crushing tender small neighbors as it lands
crashing onto the duff.

No longer propped against gravity, the bole reclines
on damp humus. Slowly, more and more
gossamer nets of hyphae thread their way
through dimensions of lignin and cellulose, the dead
and the still-living cells of the fallen giant.
Beetles, grubs, termites, millipedes, nematodes
squirm in, eat through, go hunting,
break down, consume, defecate,
and the tree-substance transforms,
becoming bug-substance and soil-substance and
air-substance, energy freed into atmosphere.

A seed lands on the softened wood,
soaks up moisture, swells, opens
and lets go of its tiny embryo
and a new tree begins on the old remains,
building from decay and air and light
new form and substance,
verdant, vital, nubile, persistent,
reaching up, retracing a memory
of the old one’s ascent,
life leading out of death
from life crumbled.

The Science

This poem celebrates the breakdown of living beings into organic and then inorganic matter as a central part of the living and nonliving ebb and flow. The decay process usually starts while a tree is still standing and continues after it falls. Hyphae are the thin strands that make up the bodies of fungi that, along with bacteria and other organisms mentioned in this poem, do the essential work of breaking down and recycling matter in forests, freeing it for uptake from the soil. The poem relates to the theme of entropy because this decay and degradation involves change from the ordered nature of living cells to a more disordered form, and the change of useful potential energy stored in organic molecules into less-useful forms. Because entropy means that energy degrades into less useful forms constantly over time, none of this continual cycling of matter into and out of life would be possible without the input of energy from the sun.

The Poet

Amy Boyd is a professor of botany and ecology at Warren Wilson College. Scientist by training, educator by profession, and writer/artist by nature, she lives in Swannanoa, North Carolina, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Next poem: An Entropic Eulogy in Three I Ching Hexagrams by Donald Beagle