Cross Cut

Slumped on a pallet of winter-withered grass
you lie dead at my feet, in age not quite
a century, perhaps, but twice as old as I am,
in a pose your twisted trunk and dwindling leaves
had never hinted, even at your sickest.
How many stubs your gangrened upper branches
had turned into sockets and armpits
for squirrel, coon, and starling
to burrow in! You thrust erect as stiff
as the memory of my oldest neighbor who watches
each new spring for your fluttering bloom
and every August for a pride of pears—
green to the eye, woody to the tooth,
taut and cidery to the fumbling tongue.
For years we’ve watched you dying from the top,
a peril to climbing children and seekers of shade,
but knew that, pearlike, you could stand for years,
heart eaten out, just fingering your life.
Perhaps I could have helped you out of the air
with some shreds of your stature left intact,
but now I’ve failed you and you lie invisible
behind the wall, your most disgraceful branches
lopped and hauled for firewood. You lie, unscarred,
beyond your element, crushed by your own weight,
shapeless and pitiful as a beachbound whale.
Close to the level of the nourishing ground
the cross-cut stump, stark white, reveals at bottom
you’re just as lively as the day you bloomed.
The hearts of your leaves shone out in valentines
and your windborne, lilting, sinewy boughs
heaped proudly up toward the waning sun
their glowing, softly tinted, bumper bushels.