Tribute to the Fallen Giantess

After the windstorm

the massive eucalypt

lies prone across the stairs

the familiar fleshy trunk

barber-poled in green pink beige

skin

pocked in places

(successful battles

with borer beetles)

pale branches

two feet around

helpless

felled.

The tree man arrives.

He says: Six men.

A full chainsaw day  and  maybe two.

Even sideways, it’s twenty feet high.

Shakes his head

and gives me a good talking to.

Had I pruned it

reduced its shaggy bulk

subtracted boughs and limbs,

it might be alive today.

“Took that wind like a sail,”

he says.

But I’m learning lately

maybe you can’t control everything.

Trees fall

and there is change.

A death, much like our own.

And we too will leave

a hole in our own backyard world

sun and sky where once

a great tree plumed.

A hundred feet

of shimmering fragrant grayish-green

the twisting limbs

of a sensual giantess.

The eucalyptus lies on its side

across the hillside stairs

stunned at the change of posture.

It’s very slow to recognize

what’s happened.

Its leaves are still so green.

such is the life locked in its woody girth

too vast for sudden death.

But the tree man says

we can’t make a table,

or even a set of garden benches.

We’ll be lucky to get it down at all.

It must be reduced

to wood chips, to be fired out

onto a freeway embankment.

Carried out as firewood.

Like a sail, the man said

reproachfully.

It died resisting the wind.

Huge and defiant.

I find myself taking the  lesson opposite

The tree man’s intention.

I say, good for you, tree.

You died whole and grand

Utterly extended into the silhouette

you were born to inhabit.

Yes, I think it’s better to live like that

Immense, ungainly even

Than to let caution trim us small

and live as half of what we could have been.