When you’ve chosen it, the one you want to chop down
and trim to its essentials and haul away
and slice to pieces, the forest will wait around you,
aware of what you’re doing. It understands
competition, light, and shade, and won’t interfere
as you pause there where the roots go underground,
where the solid trunk begins, to calculate
where your chainsaw should make its way
through bark and phloem and cambium and xylem
into the heartwood. Your tree will hold still
while you choose the angle of the undercut
and may even take for granted you have a reason
for what you’re doing, for what you chose to do.

But if you decide too far ahead of time
which way you’re going to run when your tree gives in
to gravity, when it begins losing its hold
on the balance of its own nature,
when it shudders and hesitates
and tilts and twists oddly,
it may surprise you with an unpredictable swivel
being determined by some asymmetry
in its upper branches (in some direction
you couldn’t have foretold or understood,
no matter how long you tried)
and bring you down to earth along with it
as just one more renewable resource.

 

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