A specialized microphone is used to access the inner acoustics of an oak tree. Wallace Stevens' 1942 poem, “Oak Leaves are Hands” is read aloud to the tree.
"Oak Leaves Are Hands"
In Hydaspia, by Howzen
Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen,
For whom what is was other things.
Flora she was once. She was florid
A bachelor of feen masquerie,
Evasive and metamorphorid.
Mac Mort she had been, ago,
Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,
Weaving and weaving many arms.
Even now, the centre of something else,
Merely by putting hand to brow,
Brooding on centuries like shells.
As the acorn broods on former oaks
In memorials of Northern sound,
Skims the real for its unreal,
So she in Hydaspia created
Out of the movement of few words,
Flora Lowzen invigorated
Archaic and future happenings,
In glittering seven-colored changes,
By Howzen, the chromatic Lowzen.
Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen,
For whom what is was other things.
Flora she was once. She was florid
A bachelor of feen masquerie,
Evasive and metamorphorid.
Mac Mort she had been, ago,
Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,
Weaving and weaving many arms.
Even now, the centre of something else,
Merely by putting hand to brow,
Brooding on centuries like shells.
As the acorn broods on former oaks
In memorials of Northern sound,
Skims the real for its unreal,
So she in Hydaspia created
Out of the movement of few words,
Flora Lowzen invigorated
Archaic and future happenings,
In glittering seven-colored changes,
By Howzen, the chromatic Lowzen.
- Wallace Stevens, 1942