Hope

This morning I sat in my rocking chair, well, actually it’s a swaddling chair, the difference being in where the arms are placed, where you would want to put your own arms if you were holding a baby, something I have done more than once, most often in the middle of the night when there is only the slimmest light coming through the window from the streetlamp at the curb, and I watched the men from the city saw down an enormous tree trunk which had been standing amputated across the street since three years ago when the same workers lopped off its giant branches threatening to crush parked cars and neighbors’ roofs, its presence a monument to maiming people and things and nature, the sawing man used three different chain saws to make a wedge and then hammered in secret places to make the wedge loose, and then a truck pulling a rope tied to the top of the tree pulled just enough that the tree crashed on the pavement and I applauded the workers and they looked up at me, smiling at this hopeful thing, the death after dismembering, the wide flat stump left, the earth opening for a sapling.