Branches like salmon bones drop off at the touch of the saw. Four seasons this tree turned air to flesh, rain and rock into leaves to carpet the ground. Each branch piled on another, cut end toward the wind. Rain-soaked gloves caked with sawdust. In summer, a thousand bright hands would hang from her stems. It was a short-lived tree. Water courses down my cheeks, but only rain. I expected this soon, though not this soon.
Five strokes and the trunk is halved. I trim the branches from the severed end. Water runs down the small of my back. I cannot see through these full-wet eyes. I should be sadder. This familiar work is a comfort.
If my heart would open up like this sundered bole, if this clamp around my heart would loosen, send leaves out of my fingertips, I would grow a thousand bright hands in summer. My hands in wet black make the next cut and the next. Garbage cans go skidding uphill for blocks.
I cannot hear my heart. This roar in my ears too loud, the storm too great. It ties rocks to my shoulders, splinters my lower back. I consider changing my name, so tired of this weight. I have no hope of defeat. I lean into the wind. I lean into the wind. It strips my shirt from me, sends it aloft.
My blood diluted. My sap watered down. I am pruned back a branch at a time and my roots lose their grasp on this patch of earth. A thousand bright and upturned hands in summer, faded fallen on the path to be trodden on. If I could loose this tightened chest, if I could vomit out this pain from fingertips, pieces of my limbs fallen to root somewhere and grow, I would crack open my trunk and grow out from inside myself.
Branches in neat piles against the storm. Leaves stacked up on branches’ ends, and the storm still tears at them. They lose their grasp and leap into the gray, and vanish.
=v= It’s driving me crazy in San Francisco. I’ve been seeing malpruned trees taking over my daily (bicycle) commute, bit by bit, creating “traffic sewers” by their traffic-uncalming. Mostly the trees have been subjected to lions-tailing: a trimming of the entire lower canopy, either because it’s easier or because it allows the first floor window a less-obstructed view of the street (a view of cars, not leaves).
After the recent high winds, though, I see how thoroughly incompetent these “tree-trimmers,” these “arborists,” these lions-tailers are. The absolute rudiment of tree care is to figure out which limbs are dry, or weak. These limbs have been missed, and now they’ve all come crashing down onto the sidewalks. Now the city’s street trees, already maimed, are even more hideous.
You do realize, of course, that every evocative post simply sends us scrabbling for our list of potential Joshua Tree book titles/chapter headings.
OK: mebbe just me.
“No hope of defeat”: no way to surrender the burden of human consciousness. That wish to meld inside and out reminded me of Klinkenborg’s Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile. The narrator tortoise muses on the human fascination with mirrors:
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“And were I to come upon my face as it came upon me, it would look back at me implacably, unvarying. I wear a good round expression suited to all my needs, to every occasion. As do most creatures on this earth. An everyday and Sunday, coronation and burial face. To see it once would be to have seen it for all time.
Not like the molten features these humans wear. They look again and again and never find the same visage twice. Mrs. Henry White stares into her hand-mirror as thought it were a fraud upon her intelligence. Always showing her the wrong reflection. A woman older and somehow coarser than she expects to find. Not at all the woman within.”
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I also loved Timothy’s castigation of humans for their “[d]izzying inability to bask or muse.” While humans engage in endless bother and toil, all other creatures share a single “[v]ocation of place.”
Again with the blogular in-fighting and envy! You just had to top Berube’s old Adventures in Sawing, didn’t you? I would say you won, but that would only promote more of the same.
Unless more of the same is evocative writing, in which case: Carry on.
Orange: I have, of course, no idea of what it is to which you refer.
On a completely different topic, I do have a photo of me cutting up the tree: