The Arborists
Achilles weeps over Hector’s body, the body he had
killed for glory, revenge, to open the door to his own
prophesized, glamorous death. He weeps not for Hector
but for his own father and, truly, for himself. Priam weeps
over his son’s gorgeous corpse, so gorgeous it won’t rot.
I wish I didn’t feel sorry for warriors, but I’m listening to
Derek Jacobi tell the story, his rich English voice filling my earbuds.
I approach the trees that line the Green, where men on ropes
climb with chain saws, trimming as they mount even higher
against the woolen sky. Their confidence in their task astounds.
I weep with Achilles while the arborists tie ropes to limbs
before they saw, to safely lower the hewn to the ground.
That gods immortal cannot age nor learn from their mistakes
breaks me every time, that one might not learn from suffering.
Later, while a drunk next door bangs the furniture
against the walls at midnight, doors open and close
on voices urgent, shrieking, disappearing down
the speed-bumped streets and curbsided bins that wait
for morning. O those young, leaping binmen, white
jumpsuits, impeccable gloves and hair, who will flicker
at dawn past lampposted sea birds, and O the collection
lorries, many-paneled vehicles that ladder the streets,
with starts and stops down each route to the river,
my trash to be piled on barges that will bear it
across many seas. I laugh at myself, binmen
as oracles, recycling as metaphor for my desire to start
over, or as metaphor for living. While I am terrified
by the depth of D’s sleep, which I cannot resist
interrogating, the heat of snore and drowse and
pillow snuffle, the dark cool outside the window,
the alleyway beacons, and the sterile offsiteness
of caution tape spillaging all our future griefs,
their management, and the ways we will all yet suffer.
[“The Arborists” appears here with the permission of the University Of Chicago Press, which will publish the poem in Connie Voisine’s collection The Bower.]