I. Turn off your notifications I’m trying to sleep, the wife barks. I check my phone. I tell her it is silenced, nothing’s coming in. Again, she barks about something agitating her. I wait a moment, fearing more barking, and confirm it is the wind outside, tree branches scraping the stucco on the other side of the bedroom wall, the same tree branches I have neglected to prune for thirteen years. The tree scraping becomes a lullaby and I nod off while reading a book of Portuguese poems. I am startled awake by a recurring rhythm in the key of the wife’s beeping phone, and with a curse on my lips. I turn to her, prepared to lash out, and see the tree has tunneled a sizeable crater through stucco, Tyvek wrapping, two-by-fours, insulation, and drywall. Its leafless branches look like ancient fingers, gently combing the wife’s hair in mother-to-child fashion. She is cooing like a kitten in a dream state. I look through the hole to witness the full-bodied tree bobbing with silent laughter. Now I am seething – what a pretentious tree! It refuses to look me in the eye. Then I remember: it is not yet eye-blossoming season. II. Today I trimmed our tree, the pretentious one responsible for the stucco scratching that led to the burrowed hole in our bedroom wall. Every time I snipped a branch it screamed Ouch! and I felt awful. It bemoaned, after all this time, now you decide to prune? I told the tree I had no choice, that if the wife doesn’t get quality sack time, I bear the brunt. I tried to shape it nicely, but the house side of the tree had no form and shot straight up like a utility pole. That night, I climbed into bed thinking of the tree I butchered, its hundreds of lifeless little limbs in brown lawn bags with their merciful sap tears. As the wife slept like a baby, I heard the wind whistling about in the hole in our wall, speaking in tongues I didn’t understand. The closer I listened, the more it sounded Eulogy for Leafless Limbs on Stucco in A minor by an unknown composer. III. I purchased fertilizer for the yard. I framed my push mower manual in multiple, two-page sections in the garage. I tilled the flowerbeds underneath the pretentious tree. I scooped up an ungodly amount of donkey poop from our pet donkey that has been revealed now that the snow is gone. I am tending, in preparation for a new life, but thinking about Owen in the convalescent home, my father who has been scammed out of his life’s savings, our aging donkey, this maimed tree, some backyard foxes who loiter here with terrible life habits. And Gene, our neighborhood’s resident reaper. Sometimes it feels like too damn much. The tree, I presumed as pretentious, extends one of its leafless branches down to pat my head. It holds no grudges. I give it an extra dose of fertilizer and try to make amends.
Thad DeVassie writes from the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of three chapbooks and was awarded the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2020. Recent work appears in Citron Review, Hex, HAD, Five South, Mercurius, and Gone Lawn. Find more of his work at www.thaddevassie.com.