After the windstorm
the massive eucalyptus
lies prone across the stairs
the familiar fleshy trunk
barber-poled in green pink beige
skin
pocked in places
(successful battles
with borer beetles)
pale branches
two feet around
helpless
felled.
The tree man arrives.
He says: Six me.
A full chainsaw day and maybe two.
Even sideways, it's twenty feet high.
Shakes his head
and gives me a good talking to.
Had I pruned it
reduced its shaggy bulk
subtracted boughs and limbs,
it might be alive today.
"Took that wind like a sail,"
he says.
But I'm learning lately
maybe you can't control everything.
Trees fall
and there is change.
A death, much like our own.
And we too will leave
a hole in our own backyard world
sun and sky where once
a great tree plumed.
A hundred feet
of shimmering fragrant grayish-green
the twisting limbs
of a sensual giantess.
The eucalyptus lies on its side
across the hillside stairs
stunned at the change of posture.
It's very slow to recognize
what's happened.
Its leaves are still so green.
such is the life locked in its woody girth
too vast for sudden death.
But the tree man says
we can't make a table,
or even a set of garden benches.
We'll be lucky to get it down at all.
It must be reduced
to wood chips, to be fired out
onto a freeway embankment.
Carried out as firewood.
Like a sail, the man said
reproachfully.
It died resisting the wind.
Huge and defiant.
I find myself taking the lesson opposite
The tree man's intention.
I say, good for you, tree.
You died whole and grand
Utterly extended into the silhouette
you was born to inhabit.
Yes, I think its better to live like that
Immense, ungainly even
Than to let caution trim us small
and live as half of what we could have been. 
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