Felled Tree

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.