July and the maple out the kitchen window
is browning, dropping leaves. Should I mourn
future Octobers without this red in the scenery—
my specially-bred import, expensive dwarf?

The diseased bark is releasing white larvae,
the wood pleasing wriggling piles of mouths,
if not human eyes. In my ears, chain saws’ roars
as neighbors clearcut acres of a pine plantation,
to pulp the two-hundred-foot trees. Is it a tragedy?

It’s ugly. But they were cultivated toward this fate.
I no longer want to presume that there’s a stage
in which things are better and entitled to remain.
Not since diagnosis, since nurses speaking of yet
and still: hands still able to inject my own belly,
the immobility, crippling I have yet to feel, but,

each mention reminds, will. I know what plagues
the maple is the ambrosia beetle, which is drawn
to damp, weakened trunks it bores holes and plants
fungal gardens in. I am not much interested by
insecticides. Or medications, fighting against every
progression, for life’s span, so much as this one
afternoon, easing into the pink and cool of evening.

The cells that transport water through a tree
are dead, even as it’s stretching taller, when
it’s well. When the maple does get felled,
dragged away, the stump doused in chemicals,
at least the plot the branches had shaded,
become open to the sun, will fill in, lush,
tangled, and crowded, by June. By April,
sooner, if I’m not weeding, there.




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