The eucalyptus cull

I.

 

Away morning, rented villa scented

with a lazydaisy sunlight

with past living beaten pleated into the dented

floor, the weight of unknown orchid-white

blossoms slow-brushed outside

 

you prepare breakfast, nothing fancy

nothing elaborate that the family love

heavy duty, painstaking butter-yellow-clarity

no, just a pouring from boxes into cups

a filling up and robotic portioning of unmindful, just enough.

 

There’s a staunch straight eucalyptus

in the courtyard back home, and today it must go

the municipality man has given final notice

and felling grown trees is unexpected sorrow

a life lost from life without the show

 

of mourning or closure. Not that it served a purpose

no low branches to climb, no swings

for young children, and eucalyptus

supposedly sucks out life from other growing things

even the grass a sporadic underling

 

but it’s stood there, for as long as your children can recall

silver spine upright, two tone leaves’ underside

strangely pale, drizzling sunlight in small,

finicky quanta; and generous strips of bark; can’t be right

that it’s going to suddenly topple the wall.

 

You dimly remember the planting, many years ago

on an unremarkable spring day after newly

moving in, bare new earth, many things still raw

without the patina of age, unruly

and reckless, the sheen that came too slowly

 

and so it has come finally to this

a quick getaway villa with an unmindful breakfast

in its belly. Will the tree fall quite soundless

when the saw goes through at last

as you the planter can’t bear to bear witness?

 

 

II.

 

Something sits terribly hushed about

the house as you drive back in

that grim gap, that raging mud-mouth

where once the slim trunk had been

commonplace suddenly turned obscene

 

the glass-faced windows blare

out their contents without the filigreed

darkness of leaves, the fluid flare

of shimmying limbs, shoots and roots and seed

strewn over the yard here and there.

 

You don’t sow and reap, no special

connection between growth and death

was in your mind. You planted a perennial

one spring, unthinking, on the blind faith

that trees are closer to the limits of eternal.

 

The man comes in with blunt

words, the talk is about so many clear feet

between the tree and the front

wall, the hazard to the public street

and he can’t do a thing, he really can’t.

 

Signals with an offhand cruelty

of vaguely overstepping allotted limits

the yard’s too small for even a stunted tree

forever forget trying to fit

hungry-rooted tall drizzly ones in it.

 

And so you start organising the cull

feeling just a little hard done by

who knew? that even a perennial

will stop being so once manmade rules apply

not even trees! nothing’s invincible.

 

The job’s done, and a quick trip out of town

to avoid the first cut of the ordeal

to grow something, and then to strike it down!

Abraham’s sacrifice made hauntingly real

and the blood still there gaping on the ground.

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