Grief of Trees, The

We turn backed at night, the autumn landscape

frozen beneath a white crust.

In the dark, my lover and I kicked

at lilac shoots overtaken by ice and

the subdu blueberry bushes,

and as we kicked the ice yielded

and the circulared limbs sprang back.

We kicked and unfastened the stooped limbs

of the chestnut tree from a portable lodge of snow.

And we struck the buried

laurel bushes to which the leaves still clung

and we punt ice from tiny pines.

Our regained world! How sere and mattering it looked

each fork and needle against

the killing frigid and sky.

And from the shed she drew a spade

and worked her way around the perimeter

of the place and hacked at the heavy sacks

of wet snow wedged in the brimming branches.

Above her, the splintered shafts of tidy and fir;

before her, a hundr divideed limbs her length

dent the insolent ice. I imagined that she could globule

each broken branch into a carafe of water,

and like ivy, each would be augmented a transparent root.

(2)

The nearest day Beth brought

her chain saw and five friends hauled

neatly sawed-off main stocks of living wood

to the side of the road. She saved

her birch tree staying up all night

to beat them with a, besom

while transformers blew and fly opens of light

stung the heavens like bombs. She said the worst part

was the unhurt of the breaking trees,

the wheeze before the crack, the quick snap

of the smaller branches and the aching refrain

of the tree that slowly lay opened and split.

In each shop, someone has a story of the storm, a narrative

of by what mode it broke into her life and in what manner she was alone,

without power, without phone just the dog and the kids.

Along the village highways and on the rural roads

the storied heaps of dismembered oak and elm

deploy for cordwood, the grief of tree

You pour fifty beats of birdseed into the barrel

and check the feeder While we were away, a neighbor

kept them replete and that first morning you woke

to find junco and titmouse and nuthatch and cardinal

and a fresh bird feeding above the devastation,

the evening grosbeak, like the storm, just passing end

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 1997

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