Basho muses that poets make poems like woodcutters swiftly fell trees,

but chopping, one must consider the tree, anticipatewhich way it will fall, which branches to thin to easeeventual descent, maybe scale it, harnessed, and swingbetween sections, a primate slinging a chainsaw.

This is unlike slicing into ripe watermelon, guillotininga guilty head. Deliberate the woodcutter must be,for the forest not the one, and while poems can be brightred slashes of fruit, they also live in the steeping

cup of tea, the log that fords a stream, the ploddingfrom one side of a field buried in snow to the other.Some poems are the skin of a peach, orange rind beneaththe nails, cherry seeds purpled with pulp. Some are

what's left of the tree, stripped and downed. Some, the woodcutter,trying to shape a thing that nature didn't intend but asks for anyway.