The man knocked on the door
And gave me his business card.
He wanted to tell me he would
Cut it down
For only $250
If we wanted.
And I had been thinking the whole time
That the maple
Was just being slow this year.
It is youngish, and healthy.
But suddenly, I was standing next to that man
Talking about that maple,
As if I always had known it had died.
Just like that, know-it-all words coming out
Pronouncing a death sentence.
And then it did.
It died abruptly, just then,
As we stood in front of it
Discussing its evident death,
And me, “No, thanks,”
Thinking to myself that man just killed a maple.
That man just murdered the beautiful tree.
And he touching the card in my fingers, “In case you change your mind.
You gotta remove it, you know.”
“Of course, I know,”
I spoke as if I did.
Days went by, then weeks.
By June, no one could deny it was dead.
Sloughing off its bark
Like an unneeded parka,
Withholding red-tinged buds,
And lime-dyed keys
Strangling on unborn leaves.
One afternoon, I pulled a muscle in my neck sawing off
The most obvious branches.
Weeks went by, and we
Began to notice the other
Dead trees by the creek.
Maples? We checked, but it turned out
They were tulip poplars
And catalpa.
It was happening all around now,
Beneath the green canopy
Ash, chestnut, oak, holly
Beech, elder, sycamore
So many dead sentinels,
Flagless poles
Was this part of the cycle
Of life
The dying and
Rotting and
Feeding so that others might live
Or the site of a massacre?
Months went by. Winter came,
Slowly, but it did.
And now the barren maple
Didn’t stick out
So much
Against the leafless willow oak
The city crew, who comes each January
To inspect the last elms
Stranded in the neighborhood,
A century after the blight or more.
They came with their bucket and experts
And I pretending to know,
“I’ll give you $100 cash if you take down that little thing over there.”
The man looked at me,
Then at his boss,
Then at me again, “Can’t right now. We’re on city time.”
His boss nodded.
“But I can come back on Saturday.”
He did, climbing up that dead tree,
Chain saw dangling
five feet behind by rope.
He lopped it off,
Head to stump.
We paid 250 in the end, because he pruned the mountain laurel too.
We split it and stacked it and waited.
When the first real snow finally came a month later,
We threw a piece on the grate,
Mostly out of curiosity.
It blazed hot, quick lighting, slow burning,
Not a pop,
And none of the smoke
You’d expect from maple,
Young or old.
That tree was seasoned.
Must have been dead for a good long while.
A lot longer than we ever knew.
Spitting out leaves and keys and buds
For at least a season
Somehow, though it was already dead
In root and trunk.
And we huddled around it,
Snow drifting into the house
From the unfixed old gap
Under the front door
As we fed this tree
Limb by limb
Into the fire
And became warm again.
(January 2016)