Autumn
2000
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| Joseph Bruchac |
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| BLUE SPRUCES |
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I said farewell to the two blue spruce my lumberjack grandfather planted as seedlings fifty-five springs ago when I was a small unsmiling shadow always at his heel, reaching for his hand. In that narrow strip of yard between our former gas station's new garage and the big house built up by my sister around the frame of the old horse barn, the trees had thrived, shooting up sixty feet, just as I had grown to a greater height than that man who was always my true north. But now their seasonal cascades of small sharp needles had grown too great for roofs or gutters to continue to bear. Crowded in by other trees around, their branches were dying, their tops broken. We could no longer leave them there. We called in Paul, whose arborist hands have planted far more than he has cut, who speaks to each tree he must bring down before he clips on the climbing strap, before the roar of the chain saw starts. All day the sound of the two cycle engine came down from above like the steady cascade of limbs shaped like the primary feathers of birds as large as those in legends. Below, the woodchipper's chest-rumbling growl kept pace, as Vince fed in limb after limb, spewing out a multi-colored gale to coat the snow with ground bark and needles, xylem and phloem and cambium layers transformed into thick mulch. The smell of the woods that I remembered clinging to my grandfather's denim coat when he came home from a long day's work was everywhere in the pungent air. This morning as I stand below an emptiness of sudden sky where I once looked up toward limbs as old as earliest memory, I know there is now one more pattern gone, one more missing part of receding childhood, one more sheltering presence I can no longer touch with a hand. Yet the mulch from those limbs will hold moisture, give strength to the raspberry bushes below the stone wall, add to each summer's sweet late harvest. Rough planks milled from their trunks will make solid bridges over Bell Brook, be built into walls to give others shelter. Just as spirit goes on when flesh is no longer there. Joe Bruchac's newest book of poetry, NO BORDERS, was published by Holy Cow!Press. He and his wife Carol continue to live in the same home in Greenfield Center, New York where he was raised by his grandparents and where they run The Greenfield Review Press-- on the web at greenfieldreview.org. |
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