Henry Brooks, The Willard Elm, Deerfield, 1890
Photogravure
Image Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
All of them: the arches calligraphied
over the mansions’ part of town,
sedately spaced sentinels on our street,
the solitary tree presiding where
our backyard’s unruly green broke against
the flawless black of the Zabranskys’ drive.
Because death was approaching anyway,
the creeping, unsightly kind of death,
because the town fervently objected
to ugliness, they sent the arborists
most merciful to shave crowns, to lop limbs.
Through the window where as a girl concealed
behind the elm’s serrated leaves arrayed
in chartreuse sprays I’d, fascinated, seen
the neighbor couple’s calm machinations
in their garden, tenderness extended
with a call or spade—through that same glass I
saw the tree surgeons’ inspection, saw them
wrap the elm’s trunk with a ribbon, recalled
the story about the wife / her neck / her
head / only this worn ribbon wasn’t green
and it wasn’t meant to keep a body,
anybody, together, nor provoke
that pleasant danger, curiosity.
The town replaced the public elms to keep
the treelawns dressed. The tulip poplar staked
attention-straight needed saving, required
our aching backs those drought-dry summer weeks.
Lumbering over the bristling lawn, we lugged
water in plastic jugs of Wedgewood blue
and peach that slapped our knees. I remember,
somehow, their unthoughtful anatomy—
heads that tumbled loose, short necks prone to fray
—but not the day they took that good tree down,
elm that had been for me shadow and shield.
The end became a rot-rich stump to feed,
to make them rise: quick mushrooms, swells of grass,
tiger lilies all flame and speckled soot,
the deer eating their hearts in the cleared night.