“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.”