Email Poem

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Personal Note:

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Poem

Dear swollen-trunk maple, deemed 
diseased by the saw-happy tree guy, 
you who have stood silently, supposedly 
slipping your ailment through your roots 
to the neighboring trees, now fallen 
full blast down, geometrically down, 
right angle, then parallel at last, your flat-
sawn stump blotched with incriminating 
evidence—you came and leafed 
and are gone, and I who have grown old 
in your lifetime, who intuited you rather 
than knew you, felt you in my bones, 
now feel the slightly thinner woods, 
the hint of frailty. Scott the tree guy 
has carried your eighteen-inch logs in his 
red wheelbarrow and stacked them 
for winter: a little Williams, a little Frost. 
   Oh tree, everywhere I look 
I have to pledge reclamation, fill 
the forest floor with ferns, mushrooms, 
pine needles, and in the side corner 
place the outhouse, practically unused 
anymore, still in good shape, emitting 
its rich human-waste smell, its wood 
smell, its few spiders climbing 
their trellises with their sticky feet. 
Oh tree, so much has been discovered 
to fill in the space where you were: 
seven new species of Philippine 
forest mice, a new genus of blind 
Bulgarian beetle, four new species 
of jewel beetles, six of New World 
micromoths. I have filled my note cards, 
I have left the vertical space open 
for the Ur-tree, the canonical vision 
that will take your place, even the stigmata, 
your bulged and arthritic joints, the 
whither of your leaving, the grand word 
whither standing where you were.

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