1. I just love trees…I think about what they see.
2. Thoreau said take your body to nature—where nature can root inside you.
3. I kneel on the ground, lay my head where the tree trunk rises from earth,
4. look up to the splayed limbs overhead, and study how they thin the farther they travel out.
5. I stretch my arms overhead, limbs among limbs.
6. From the understory, I see the sky in sections through the branches,
7. the entirety of tree reaching heavenward.
8. I remember when it was a sapling and my only friend.
9. In some ways a tree is just as important as a person, in its own life.
10. Today, an eagle perched in the tree.
11. I kept thinking, the object is so great, why lose it in paint.
12. And I walked on.
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1., 9. Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art. 335.blackbaudhosting.com/335/Virtual-Gallery-Talk-with-
Victoria-Browning-Wyeth-Wyeth-through-a-Lens-25Jan2022.
10. Meryman, Richard. Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life. HarperCollins, 1998, p. 186.
12. —. p. 117.
Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020). She’s an assistant editor at Boulevard magazine, has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024–2025 CityArtist grant. For her third poetry collection, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, Baugher won Tupelo Press’s 2023 Dorset Prize (forthcoming in 2026).
