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Chainsaw

Today I should go down and fire up the chainsaw,
but it is old, and it forgets to start
after a week or so of rest.
I expect it will turn stubborn
and pulling on the lanyard will only make it mutter
or cough a bit without conviction.
I too am old, but never have learned patience with machines.

Still there are dead but standing trees that would be better down.
The roots that carried poison to their hearts are rotting,
and they lose their grip on earth,
and the naked trunks that stand too near the house
become siege towers
like the ancients used to topple kingdoms,
and the winter winds could use
to crush us in our bed.

I am afraid that when he hears the saw,
my neighbor will recall the promise that I made
to amputate the living limbs of big leaf maple
that hang across his boundary
and every fall drop their exhausted foliage on his deck.
I do not know if I can climb and rig it
to break and swing their fall across his fence
the way a younger man, with less respect for gravity, could do.

And who will watch my wife, who unaware of danger
stands underneath the work and begs me to come down,
or wanders off into an ever-unfamiliar woods?
So, I may find another way to waste another day,
and when it ends,
to lie in bed another night and listen to the wind.

—
David Schnare is a retired house painter, dishwasher, used car reconditioner, cathode ray tube assembler, warehouse clerk, hospital orderly, and general practice physician. His poems have been published in Better Than Starbucks, The Ekphrastic Review, and Hole in the Head Review.

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