THE GREEN FUSE IGNITES

When Tropical Storm Isaias receded today, we walked along the Riverside Drive Promenade to survey the damage. It was awe inspiring. The normally bare cobblestones were strewn with sticks and leaves, the sparrows perching at eye level on the vertically jutting branches of doubled-over trees. Most striking was the great uprooting of many large trees, the largest shown in the accompanying photograph. Although these were no redwoods, the ripped-out roots made me mindful of them.

The scene also reminded me of the opening stanza of one of the first poems to get under my skin when I was a teenager, Dylan Thomas’s lustful and high-pressured “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

In the tensile power of these lines—and in the poem as a whole—Thomas tightly weaves together images of sap thrusting through growing plantlife, blood pumping in the veins of the maturing human body, and the explosive, destructive power of the wind. The blasts of the storm that had just passed through our park embodied a similar force to the one Thomas seems to be describing: utterly vital, utterly destructive.