Cutting Down the Anniversary Pine
Things expand. Plans change. Clouds disperse,
people move. I remember swimming
through a dream’s warm water, and rising
for air only to find that I no longer lived
within that need, in that space demanding
the physiological transport of oxygen,
where the laws of physics reigned supreme,
and geometry, with a little luck, posited
all the right questions. And then the clock
blared and morning slammed me back.
Trees grow, as do needs and lives and even
cottages. We took down the dead Jack pine
that year, and drank skip-and-go-nakeds
by the pitcherful, while mosquitoes swarmed
me and ignored everyone else. It’s important,
but I still can’t recall the white pine, nor
where you planted it forty-three years ago.
Symbol or not, its treeness intrudes.
So we suffer these things with age, and if
what we cut down carries meaning beyond
cellulose and shade, bark and pine scent,
we’ll bear that mourning, too. So fuel your
saw, brother, and sharpen the chain. Today
becomes yesterday. Tomorrow never waits.
* * *
“Cutting Down the Anniversary Pine” was drafted during the Tupelo Press 30-30 Challenge in August 2015, and was published by Quiet Letter in April 2017.
O at the Edges 
What a tribute — lovely as always. And I am reminded, now, of the hickory my sisters and I once crouched beneath to gather and peel green-husked nuts till our nail beds rusted. My dad cut down the tree when I was an adult and moved out, though not on — he said the tree dropped nuts on his car. Had it ever not? My heart broke.
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Thank you, Carrie. My heart would have broken, too. Ow!
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I love the feel of this piece, Bob, the rhythm. Its only weakness is omission of the skip-and-go-naked recipe.
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Thanks, Cate. Ha! I don’t remember the proportions, but the drink used frozen lime juice or lemonade, vodka and beer. Very powerful, 😲
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Trees are such powerful symbols – standing ones – lasting beyond their physical form. Yet we recall them in their “treeness”. A significant live oak tree of my childhood grew on my grandmother’s farm, and had been significant to my mother and all her siblings; gone now, and I’d be hard put to find its exact spot somewhere out beyond the barn, on the other side of the big gate … But I easily put myself on its spreading branches draped in grapevines almost the diameter of the branches, swinging, singing, back in a gone yesterday. Your poem nudged me up on the rough bark again! (Thanks!)
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Oh, they are such powerful symbols. I remember all of the trees I’ve cut down, most of them dead or damaged beyond recovery. We’ve turned many of these into heat, and have used bits and pieces of others for walking sticks, etc. I’m forever grateful for all they give us.
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Porch enlargement (early 90s) took out a beautiful native persimmon tree – trunk and 50% of the limbs were embedded in concrete in a galvanized tub and stayed on the new porch as cat-perch for years. (Always in the way, always reminding me of a dubious choice I couldn’t reverse – but the cats did love it.)
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Ha! Our unwillingness to let go can sometimes bite us. 🙂
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So, of course, I zero in on the swimming through water dream part of the tree poem, because that brought a flood back to me! As a child, I had recurring dreams that I could breathe underwater (I remember at least one such dream in which I was surrounded by tadpoles! Hmm…), but now that I’m middle-aged, my water dreams always entail the struggle of trying to swim laps in a pool, in which the water’s surface is as unforgiving as a sheet, and my arms are totally ineffectual…
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Ha! Of course! I’m much more likely these days to have dreams resembling your pool dreams. Ugh.
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Lost a huge pine to beetles this year. It was a living Christmas tree my late husband and I brought to our new house 30 years ago
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I feel those losses. A combination of drought and freeze killed a good number of the trees on our rural property. Very sad, and there was nothing we could do to prevent it.
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Most thought-provoking. We grow climbers up some of our dead trees
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Certain trees stay with us even after they’re gone.
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Yep
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The ghosts of trees and life. They linger. (K)
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They do indeed, Kerfe!
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Beautiful as a pine.
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Thank you, Sudhanshu.
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