After the Windstorm

The pop and snarl of chainsaws punctuate

My grimly eulogistic thoughts of trees

Splintered and toppled. Dark furies, darker fates,

Have strewn our lawns with leafy similes,

These broken boughs, that shattered trunk, and now

White sawdust rising breath-like on the sun.

The foreman lifts his hardhat, wipes his brow.

This deed that's done will not really be done

Until specific consequences make

Specific claims, not only rank decay

But absence, absence. The saws stop. Coffee break.

Two orange trucks will haul it all away.

I think of another windless morning. You said,

A time to die, another to be dead.