Once I believed all trees were smart,
that without either brain or heart
they winced at saws, dreamed under snow,
and knew things I would never know.
Green wisdom, I naively thought.
But disenchanting teachers taught
Daphne stiffened into laurel
is a whimsy, not a moral.
And so the apple tree that marred
with leaves and fruit my rented yard
meant nothing as it died each year
but a clogged mower and the fear
that in a storm it well might fall,
stave in the roof or pierce a wall.
The wood had withered from within,
like that worm-eaten trunk of sin
conceived by some myth-making Jew,
and all its fruit was rotten too.
Ants gnawed out pueblos hole by hole;
they bit and chewed until the bole
was less like log and more like rust,
the heartwood crumbling into dust.

One day, roused by a horrid noise,
I saw my landlord with two boys.
Their chainsaw shrieked and then had done;
an hour’s work and they were gone.
Now where the crippled tree had stood,
bewildered insects, chips of wood,
no tumored bough but emptiness—
and sin and death and consciousness.
The god sought flesh beneath new bark;
the druids worshipped in the dark.
Around the vanished apple tree
whose phantom swayed in vacancy
a faery ring of mushrooms spread,
a ripple on an empty bed.