“Ways to Measure Trees”
Level I, Limited Visual Assessment
Mostly I just walk right on by.
Today’s tour is for little details:
Careful looks in quick time.
I don’t have to know a tree
To take it at its face. Yielding
To the detail of where I am,
I get to know the distance. Can I
Keep the gentle fence of myself?
I say and note from afar what I see,
Scan the stresses I can. One form
Asks whether the tree appears
To exhibit a history of failures.
Mostly… I just keep it moving.
“How to draw trees”
first sitting
wait until winter
then, go slowly
soft lines
slow gestures
pull your quiet
pencil to paper’s edge
trees do this too
go slowly sometimes
second sitting
mainly it’s a manner
of carrying the body
do not draw leaves
or buds
do not stop
for lack of material
shade can come
later
winter is for drawing
will i miss spring
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From Shade is a place by MaKshya Tolbert. Copyright © 2025. Available from Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.
MaKshya Tolbert
MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and co-stewards Fernland Studios, an open-ended studio insistent on rest, rejuvenation, and reciprocity as a core compositional practice. Tolbert was the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship Guest Curator, and served as 2024-25 Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. She has received fellowship and residency support from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, New City Arts, Community of Writers, and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Her recent poetry and prose can be found at Poem-a-Day, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Poets for Science, and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Shade is a place is her first book. In her free time, she is elsewhere—a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls “that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.”
