Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything

In the 2022 poetry collection from Copper Canyon Press, The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang enters the “big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff,” to quote Doctor Who. As much as this collection is an exploration of waka Japanese forms, it is also an exploration of time. While the poems often use strong nature imagery, that imagery reminds readers that nature is linked to time—as the passage of every season is a reminder of time passing. 

However, in this collection, that passage occurs always and never. Sometimes it’s sped up and sometimes slowed down. In some ways, the book moves at break-neck speed as in the poem “The Shortest Night”:

And when I looked up,
the sky had also turned black
and I had aged a 
hundred more feet down the road.
The owl was on the
next tree with mirrors as eyes,
in case I wanted
to see my future. When I 
looked, I lost another year.

In the blink of an eye, we’ve moved forward in time an entire year by simply looking at something which should’ve presented the speaker’s present. Time is in constant motion here. 

This is contrasted against poems like “Wanting to See” where the opening lines declare “It is midwinter / and I cannot bear the minutes, / their procession as / they keep inching like snipers.” In one moment, we are hurtling through time and then next crawling. 

The reader could surmise that this is how the trees witness everything—sometimes all at once and sometimes painstakingly second by second. This notion is reinforced in the poem “Touching the Tree:”

How is it that trees
don’t feel the way humans do?
The oldest tree is
five thousand years old, great storms
captured in its trunk.
A heart never grew inside
us. It was buried.
Its beat never meant to keep
time, just meant to keep distance.

In this poem, the trees capture and monitor time—its seasons, its storms within itself while humans are left to bear it. 

The idea of distance in this poem is also interesting because it reflects the construction of the book which, on first glance, mimics a tree trunk. It’s tall and thin. All of the poems within the work follow suit with short lines and multiple poems on one page. The experience, as a reader, of holding the thicker bound poetry collection (there’s 125 numbered pages) with nearly half the normal width of a typical poetry collection, is that the book constantly tries to close itself. The reader has to actively work at opening the trunk and peering into it. Each time we crack open time to look, we are pushed out. There’s always distance between us and the experience of the trees, the nonlinear experience of time.

In a way, this book is a literal and metaphorical message of resistance — not against time itself — but against the perceiving of time. As Chang writes herself in “In the Open,” “Trees witness everything, / but they always look away.”

Victoria Chang * The Trees Witness Everything