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Dendro-chronology

Here is my time machine!
He waved a hand at a flattened disc,
a twenty-foot section that sat in the centre of his lab.
Cut from the heart of a bristlecone pine,
it was a round table awaiting a more romantic age.

He assumed we knew that each ring of the tree
marked the boundary between each year's growth.
He assumed we knew that the qualities of each ring
spoke of the weather during the growing months.
He assumed
that we were impressed by the fact
that he had a whole section, not just a bore.
What he presented to us was a long-playing record,
sounding a fanfare for 7,000 Springs.

See here, that excellent spell back in the fifteenth century,
and that sun-less May of 1311.

He had placed some labels out near the rim,
'Storming the Bastille', 'Columbus to America'.
'The Battle of Hastings', 'The Birth of Christ'

Then running backwards out into the middle
were the silent times; the years of neglect,
when the tree had to struggle for light with its parents.

Cross-relating his work to bog oaks, glaciers
he had extended the record, he told us, right back to the Ice Age.
He had listened to the past for trends, for clues.

Later in the pub, he revised this history,
he re-labelled obsessively in a copper-plate hand.
The innermost rings were 'When my wife gave birth'.
When he had worked through the 'parties', 'open-days', 'mumps'.
When he had worked on through 'Find time to talk!'

The job had been long, it had filled up the years.
He was only bereft now because he had come to the bark.
As he bought me a whiskey he returned to 'more work'.
A fallen tree still lay across his path.

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