by Kip Knott
WHEN THE TREE CUTTERS CAME
I heard the small man say it.
“This tree’s diseased.”
Then the big men moved in
with trucks and chain saws.
Its shadow had always fallen
across the house,
like an oaken watch-dog
and here were huge humorless behemoths
scrambling up ladders.
taunting us with how the tree
was no protection after all.
They lopped branches from the top
like they were separating years lived
from the people who lived them.
Before they removed it all together,
they would cut it down to size.
With blinding buzzing strokes,
they demolished childhood
in a shower of chips,
widened the sky
until it almost swallowed the roof
with light.
The tree grew smaller and smaller,
until it was half itself,
and then nothing but roots.
I wandered the rubble,
an amnesiac scouring out his past.
Then the big men left
and the small man surveyed
the job they’d done,
grinning at me, nodding at the wreckage.
So nothing is permanent, I figured,
not even what’s been here forever.
As he wrote the check,
my father didn’t say a word.
Even then, the cancer riddled his roots.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio, U.S.A. His new poetry chapbook, Distress Signals, is available from tiny wren publishing. His third full-length collection of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is forthcoming in 2023 from Kelsay Books. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read and see more of his work at kipknott.com.