From “A Conversation About Trees,” which appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of The Sewanee Review.

I set out here to construct an argument about “nature poetry,” in order eventually to suggest that the composition of poems about nature constitutes, in the present moment, a political act. I had a tidy thesis all set to be defended with the usual feints and thrusts. But reading over what I’ve written, I realize that I don’t believe it.

When I was young, Thoreau’s journals made intuitive sense to me:

Consider the turtle . . . Perchance you have worried yourself, despaired of…