[lit-ideas] Re: From Tree to Me
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 20:17:52 -0700
Because--I know no one is supposed to begin a sentence with "because," but
that's how the thing runs in my head--I failed somehow to buy whatever
machine it was that a friend's husband was using to push trees down (an Alfa
Romeo perhaps?) today I went the more dubious route of asking the tree
feller fellows who were working on the storm-downed tree opposite if, since
they were already on site, they'd like to bring down my Ponderosa Pine. Why
dubious? Because--there I go again--my experience with previous such asks,
for example when my neighbor was having her tarmac "done," is that the
foreman reasons as follows, "The man must be an impatient sort, unlikely to
get the usual three bids, therefore I'll aim high and see if I can make
another boat payment." Today's bid was like that--a bundle for the
de-bottoming (there must be some equivalent of de-capitating) of one
tree--but as it happened, I was indeed impatient, worried even. It was a
big tree, and looking very dead. The last thing I wanted on my conscience
was the flattening of some passing dog. Or person.
So I agreed to their bid, waved my hand towards the scrub that the birds
have planted and asked that they trim it, learned that what I had thought
were innocent and fairly small trees, growing slowly over the county's sewer
line, were in fact elms. They must be some American, post-Dutch-disease
form of elm. The likelihood, however, is that they would have grown quite
quickly into nuisances.
Conditional tense. They are now ex-elms. And we are pineless, more or
less...well, to the count of one. Not only are we pineless, we have nicely
stacked wood. Did the exhorbitant fellows do this? No chance. Tree
cutters hereabouts--and this, mark you in a state in which loggers are
constantly being portrayed as without funds and desperate--tree cutters are
labor's aristocracy. They will bring a tree to the ground. They will chop
it into chunks. But further placement of the chunks is your problem.
Two hours of very heavy work did the trick. By "heavy" work, I mean moving
chunks that weighed a good deal more than a hundred pounds from one side of
our house to the other. The wheelbarrow and sweat are wonderful things.
Was it a good decision? Whenever we spend chunks of money, this question
comes up. In this case, the answer is easy. One look at the remaining
stump shows that the tree was under some form of bug attack and had rotted
from the inside out. If ever a tree was ready to do a little dog
flattening, this was it. Thank God for the prompt.
I have dipped into four volumes of poetry this evening to test a friend's
advice: Billy Collins, Nikki Giovanni, Philip Levine, Andrei Codrescu. The
advice was that in poetry the line, rather than the sentence, is king. I am
surprised by what I found. I see what she is talking about. That's
certainly what people seem to believe. But what I heard in my ear as I read
was, "Is that what *you* want to do?" I read recently poems by a member of
this list. Very moving, very taut, not a word wasted. Truthful. I wrote
to her saying that they reminded me of Nikki Giovanni, and now I have to
write again saying that the Nikki Giovanni that I remembered is not around
any more. Billy Collins is closer. He certainly believes in the line king.
What I think I'm saying is that I have in my head a particular version of
how poems should go. I surprised myself when I posted, in response to
Mirembe's request for April offerings, "Alice's Restaurant." There must be
something of Arlo's wit and whimsy in my ear. Something *of*, not the thing
itself. I cannot, however, say that I've arrived at what I'm aiming at yet.
Therefore, thank you for your patience. Please, keep sending advice, or
bits you hear from people who are further along than I am.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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