By Paul Hostovsky
They came with their heavy equipment at 7 in the morning.
A crane, a bucket truck, a transport truck with those iron
palisades, two dump trucks and a chipper. The doomed trees,
each marked with a spray painted red bindi, stood quietly
with their eyes closed, swaying a little in the breeze,
looking perfectly calm, perfectly healthy, perfectly
innocent. I was having second thoughts as the men in work boots
descended on my lawn, smoking their cigarettes and yelling to each other
over the roar of the crane engine. I had agreed
on six thousand dollars for twelve massive pines. “You’ll sleep
much easier knowing they’re gone,” said the guy who gave me
the estimate, pointing out the ones that threatened the house.
A smaller one had fallen last summer on the roof above my bedroom
during a windstorm. “You’re lucky it wasn’t one of these,
any of them could have killed you in your sleep,” said this man who made his living
killing trees. There was a war going on out there–who knew? And yet the trees
looked so peaceful, so majestic, so condemned–the crane operator
carefully backing the mammoth machine into my tiny backyard, trampling
the roses. I didn’t stay to watch the carnage. I left for work,
or what I call work–nothing so physical or strenuous or violent
as cutting down twelve 150-foot coniferous trees in the prime
of their lives. My work is smaller, safer, quieter. Words mostly—
considering them. Collecting them. Putting them together. My little
puzzles. When I got home the men were gone, the trees were gone,
a faint smell of pine in the air, huge divots in the grass where the crane
had been parked. And lots of little twigs and pine cones littering the lawn, sticky
with sap, left to me to pick up, to sniff, to consider, to put together.
Paul Hostovsky’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His latest book of poems is Pitching for the Apostates (Kelsay, 2023). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com
Hot Pot Magazine 