The Last Tanenbaum

image borrowed from bing

The Last Tanenbaum

“Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle

of reason in the throat.”--H.G. Bohn.

Christmas came,

before I left the last time

after our painful disengagement;

one of my last memories was stopping

at the door and looking back

at you next to the tall fir in your living room,

resplendent, laden with the children’s decorations,

colorful blinking lights, strings of yellow-white popcorn,

& those damn silly Simpson’s bulbs--

feeling the rush of recent memory

when we found it on that gray rainy day

out on the bluff among its evergreen brethren

at that unique tree farm that overlooked the Sound,

how it spoke to us:

“Hey, look at me, for I am the one you seek,

the tree that will love you.”

We were four under two umbrellas

while I worked on my knees in the mud,

sawing, sawing with that jagged crosscut blade,

deeper & deeper into its stubborn trunk,

finally toppling it over into the girl’s anxious arms,

before carrying it wet in our eight hands,

ping-ponging through the dripping ragged rows

before hoisting it high onto the rails atop

your silver Volvo station wagon, tethering

it with green & yellow twine--

oh how we giggled, laughed, and caroled

along those several happy miles, listening

to it shift & sway above our bobbing heads.

Later, on a brief coffee date, you told me about

about that night, soon after a lonely New Year’s Eve,

when you dismantled it alone, packing

the decorations gently back into their bright boxes,

and how you kept staring at it, erect, robust--

& for reasons never articulated, you could not bear

to part with it completely, to hand it over to the garbage

man, because somehow this tree was different.

You dragged it outside, and leaned it up on the lee 

of your house, near your bedroom window, where

it rested month after month, until Winter

moved into Spring.

I drove by your place several times & saw it there;

brown-black, brittle, beaten down, yet defiant,

nestled against the siding,

a decaying, 

perhaps forgotten sentinel,

perhaps symbolic of the last gasps

of our relationship,

perhaps being punished, tortured, abused

as bizarre retribution.

Intrigued & saddened, one day

before you came home from work,

I could stand it no longer

& decided to move it.

As my hands slid under its dry boughs,

it was still capable of bleeding pitch,

& unbelievably, on its underside,

some of its needles were still green;

death had not fully claimed it yet.

I cradled it in my arms, pulling

it upright, whereby most of its driest needles

began to fall off, & I swear I heard

a faint whisper on the warm breeze;

“Thank-you, oh thank-you

for coming back, for I could not

have lasted much longer.”

I dragged it for an hour

into the woods

on the east side of your house,

leaning it up against an indifferent alder.

It seemed so frail, so naked that

I had to hug it one last time,

and then sit beside it, holding

the green branch, talking to it softly,

waiting for its final breath. 

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over on dVerse Poets MTB

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