The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Even the squalid Asian quarters are a luxury—no falling bombs, no rape or torture. He sits in his berth for hours, sucking on mango stones, feeling like the king of creation.

It regards the chest-deep woman in the water holding her tiny daughter on high like she’s about to baptize the girl.

You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.

She wants only peace. But this is where she must live now: In the shadow of the bent mulberry.

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress’ name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!”

Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful. She sees the source of that forestry doctrine she so resisted in school.

But nobody’s anger can hurt a girl who has already died.

Life’s moment is here. A test that it has not yet had. She lives through eternity, under a pile of clothes, in the back seat of a freezing car.

But there’s a kicker: other people, real people, on the other end of modems, will each be furthering their own culture in other parts of this virgin world. And every one of those other, actual people will want the land beneath any other player’s empire.

In that dream, the trees laugh at them. Save us? What a human thing to do. Even the laugh takes years.

And way down below, subterranean, in the humus, through the roots of humility, gifts flow.

Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.