PANDO TOO
By Ben Gunsberg
Photography: Austen Diamond, VisitUtah.com
I traveled to the grove, where I was told the world’s largest organism, a colony of quaking aspens, lived. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Pando, which means “I am,” the name for the grove’s one stem, and for all the stems, the trees and all the space around them, the trunks and branches, the leaves — their cells and chloroplasts, the sap that courses through them. I walked and walked amidst gray-green limbs. An old man looked at me as if from another planet. I saw a deer, all but invisible. Everything was big except for me and my vision. One thousand acres of heart and lungs. The dirt path humans had made to navigate the fading giant was a washaway tattoo.
Ben Gunsberg is an associate professor of English at Utah State University. His work appears in Poetry Daily, DIAGRAM and Mid-American Review, among other magazines. He is the author of the poetry collection “Welcome, Dangerous Life” and the chapbook “Rhapsodies with Portraits.” His poetry has won awards from the University of Michigan Hopwood Center and the Utah Original Writing Competition. He lives in Logan, at the foot of the Bear River Mountains.