It would have taken, you said, at least ten people holding hands
to encircle the tree. For each meter or so of circumference,
a baobob is supposed to have lived one hundred years,
so this tree in Tanzania, with a view of the Indian Ocean,
is more than a thousand years old, several feet of wrought iron fence
absorbed into its trunk, hundreds of gallons of water inside,
and its companion baobob across, also old, thick and full of water
that the old tribes knew how to tap and use, the branches that a healer hung with amulets for curing everything from AIDS to betrayal.
With its ratio of years to gallons, let Dahl’s tree
be the word problem where everything is answered.