On a Tree

Buzz saws and chippers accompany these lines to a maple,“Seeldom,” in Spenser’s words, “inward sound,” but all that remained ofSix large trees lately destroyed next door, the neighbor afraid thatThis one would fall on him sleeping in his hammock, and leaves wereDirty, and his wife and children didn’t feel like getting crushed.We shared the shade, but the maple grew on his side of the line,Seven or eight feet, and fifteen years ago in late AugustDuring a thunderstorm half the tree split, falling in our yard.

Nevertheless, the tree’s other half remained and grew back strong.I watched the wound get hard and the bark close over the split, butSeveral dead branches and still the scar there panicked my neighbor,Just the way previous neighbors next door also reacted—Seeing a limb on the ground poststorm meant it tried to kill them.Could something be in the water of that house making them thinkRaising their property’s value meant improving it, sans trees?

Now they’re all gone and the house denuded. Happy and safe? Cursed.That’s what the place says to me in our historic and urbanDistrict where, frankly, a lot of others chop down their massiveTrees without thinking except of sketch-thin, passive replacementsFor this oasis of green that Google Earth pictures reveal,Lonely in otherwise unplanned asphalt, concrete, and uglySprawl called the Valley and where I never would have lived unlessOld trees and just as old architecture offered assuranceAs much as nature and forests all around my house beforeMoving here—calling it home for us to raise our family.

Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf moved here in the eighteenthCentury—1740s. Where’s his tree and the bronze plaqueSaying he planted it? Overnight replaced with some red mulch. Nine decades after Count Zinzendorf, did tree-loving GustavGrunewald know something I didn’t when he painted his landscapesBased on this area: broken stumps in every foreground,Even when shade and exotic laurels parted for snakyTrunks thick with river silt overhanging people placed like birds?

Hard hat with cigarette, belly, ass crack, wraparound mirrorSunglasses, chain saw, and swagger, do you know what I’m saying?Taking another step back, dear neighbors, you might think I soundLike a believer in dryads, if that word can still be known:Spirits who live within trees and die when they do, but that’s notReally what I want to say, or closest to that would be theLines from the psalm about wanting trees to hang our harps upon.

Actually that’s what I called the maple half that remained whenIt split before. Yet to fill the aching, empty space I choseFive weeping willows or Salix babylonica for shade;Hoping for then what I can see now: the shade beneath their sway;Refugee squirrels and displaced birds recovering there withIvy below—that these neighbors also ruthlessly destroy,Sacred to Bacchus or not; the shade of some presentiment,Knowing our split maple’s shade would not survive if our neighborsThought much about it, yet knowing willow shade would provide when“Paramours”—Spenser again—like this lost maple disappeared;Almost impervious shade despite the maple’s being gone;Shade and protection becalming: perfect first for recallingThis humble maple, however unsound inwardly, next forKnowing this tree joins the other great trees, real or imagined,Fallen or growing, beginning “in the midst of the garden”:Knowledge and life never ending. How could they ever mean less—

Towering pin oak outside my bedroom when I was a childUp to my harping so sentimentally on this mapleAnd in between. I remember sprouting Jesse trees with Christs,Davids and more from their loins entwirling medieval windows,Sculptures, and stories; the garden olives golden as my God’s Agony; olives that grow in deserts, waterless and strong;Willows I planted and lost; the poplar trees and strange fruit, slaves;Cedars with leopards and martial eagles; baobabs studdingOutstretched savannas aspiring to democracy; palm treesBalancing entrances...