The Kentucky Coffee Tree / Theodore Engelhardt
The city of Chicago is apparently very fond of their Kentucky Coffee Trees, because I see them in every park, and along every avenue. For my part I can’t help, when I see them, peeling open one or two of the seed pods, for the large chocolatey-smelling beans inside. They feel very nice in the hand, and are smooth, and they clack all together in the palm or the pocket very nicely, like seashells clattering. On occasion, when I seem ridiculous to myself, I turn my pockets out and let them clatter in a great heap all over the floor.
These trees will quickly go extinct, however, unless our mere fondness for them can sustain their propagation in perpetuity. Formerly, it is said, they were a great favorite of the Wooly Mammoth, and one can very well see why, for they have a crispy, airy, many-layered texture which, given the appeal to even my incompatible human mouth, must have provided the mammoths with wide realms of herbivorous glee. I suppose we may only compare such a foreign joy to the impossible dream of finding a tree which bore baklava, and butter croissants. You can imagine the joyous trumpeting of the mammoths on finding a grove of Kentucky Coffee Trees.
Having no natural consumers of their seed pods any longer, there is now no natural purpose for the Coffee Tree’s protracted extant-ness, excepting only the barren human delight of them as unfinicky ornament (which I suppose we must to some extent consider “natural” as well). Now they are alone upon the earth, an archaism, lacking utterly all context and counterpart, like, for example, the eye sockets of a creature born eyeless, to a race of eyeless creatures, into a world whose air has become sadly so saturated with some injurious element, and so suddenly, that survival’s only expedient was to abandon sight altogether, for some time perhaps, or forever. But this is a drastic, an apocalyptic analogy. Let us compare it rather to a widow, or a widower, drinking coffee out of one of a pair of matching cups.
It is disturbing, to know just how recently in evolutionary history this symbiotic relationship collapsed. How crushing to think that some mere thousands of years ago, there were men here, on this very same ground upon which I now sit, who knew, and had heard, and could describe the sound of mammoths chewing the seedpods—and that they did not accurately or fairly appreciate or praise it—no aboriginal songs remain on the subject—for they still had the mammoths, and they could not therefore love them properly. I, too, shall be envied abstractly, by a future humanity, and even hated by them, though they shall not know my name, for every scrap of me will have long since disintegrated. Rather it will be us they hate, and perhaps rightly so, for having done nothing to save the countless miracles which we snuff out under our boots every day; and perhaps they’ll even accuse us of selfishness, for not having exterminated some of our own numbers. They themselves will have new species, which they will think little of, having them.
Inscribed on a Cave Wall, c. 2,500 BCE
The soft weeping of the new brides is heard
among us in the rocks,
despite the hard falling of the ice-rain,
and the mammoths chewing, chewing.
For Kam-ahapát the Cavernous
delights in the weeping of the new brides,
and stirs the sound about the caves
with the warming wind of spring.
Theodore Engelhardt is a poet from Pennsylvania, living between Central American countries. He is working on a great “medieval” compendium of literary sketches of plants and animals, titled respectively “Herbarium” and “Bestiary.”
