Olive Branch
This frigid, wind-whipped early Saturday a.m.,
I'm intruded upon, my pristine privacy violated,
By a stranger (a wiry little guy sporting goggles,
A tattered green-and-white-checked lumber jacket, boots,
Scandinavian blond hair and beard),
Who, knocking on my kitchen door,
Surprises the fright right out of me,
As I sit at the table, naked, capturing ideas, on paper,
Preparing to feed the day to my imagination.
I open the door, speak, through the screen,
To likely the sole visitor I'll have, all week,
Though visiting me certainly isn't his mission.
He's a tree cutter, who's been summoned,
By the cabin's landlord,
To remove the foot-in-diameter, forty-foot-high white pine
Growing beside the kitchen deck,
Whose graceful, spaciously swaying boughs
I've admired for the five years I've been staying here.
Believing it to be a victim of disease
And having less than no say-so as to its destiny,
All I can do is acquiesce to his message of doom
And its subsequent shrill, dust-filled fury,
Which mutilates, dismembers the beautiful, breathing tree;
Indeed, the raucous chainsaw and shrieking maw
Of the chipper attached to the cherry-picker truck
Eventually force me to dress,
Flee my retreat, seek refuge in the woods.
Three dislocated hours later, when I return,
Quietude has usurped the tumult.
The cabin is mine again; so is silence,
But the tree isn't,
Save for fifteen feet of its lichen-covered trunk,
Bearing five six-foot limb-stubs,
On one of which shivers a two-foot bough,
Clutching a twig-cluster of green-needle sprigs —
An olive branch it's desperately offering to death.
09/24/11 - (1)
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