Missing Trees

The day the Simple Man
Tree Service came to claim
the ornamental pears, I was spying
from the porch, my summer post
and occupation, the neighbor’s
yard kitty-corner across the street
shaded and speculative.

Six workers for two trees,
it hardly seemed fair. They moved
as ants, ants with headphones, the lead
ant (chainsaw equals power, rank) bald
and with a dangling cigarette. This,
a job so easy he needn’t extinguish
his smoke.

The woodchipper mawed, an insatiable
beast, spewing pureed bark and leaves
into the truck bed. Brand name: Vermeer,
and those trees reminded me of a Magritte
painting, two singular, rounded canopies,
shadowed just so. It could be evening,
even in the day.

So this is art. The sawing, the gentle palm
upon craggy bark, the wayward push.
They don’t yell “timber,” if you care.
Both trees fell quickly, quietly. Any sound
was drowned by the heavy machinery’s
rumble and whine, or blocked by headphones.
Everyone was there. Nobody heard.

What of the birds who held a
nightly convention in those twin towers?
Did they watch from nearby rooftops,
shocked or reproachful? Did they shrug
their wings at the motives of humans?
The ornamental pears were healthy, just
in the way. Grown too close to the Lees’ siding.
How long since I’d sat on the porch
before a rolling storm, wondering where
the other tree across the street had gone, a different
tree that put us in the mood of Halloween.
It was there just the other year, when I’d come
from the doctor with nothing to deliver but news
and stared at the warped deadening branches
and thought, That is not me. I am nothing like that.
But of course that’s exactly what I am, save for being
cut down.

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