Tempted by restive night to make
a festive figure, given each
an ax and hour there,
an hour before the evening
news, the human beings flock to this
still-living stand of minded pine.
The shapes are perfect
triangles. The range
has been arranged to hide the wild.
(But every old saw has a human child.)
The little trees are planted from
the blacktop to the fence. They can’t
escape the blinking Santas or
the hundred Rudolphs
on the looping tape...
Manned by some unsteady creature,
one Dodge truck has backed into the crèche;
and thanks to pigeons, several wise men are defiled.
A city father and his son, who had
to sit all day, have come
from officework and school; they know the ways
of pencil sharpeners: they press against their tools.
Alas, the saw is dull, or bent; they dent the tree,
they pull; it must submit. They drag it off
against its grain, and up the stairs
toward a gaping living room. There is the table,
with its tethered bird. There is the woodstove where
Thanksgiving’s trees were burned. The evergreen has
got its hackles up, as otherwise it couldn’t mean to
— spreads its arms across the jamb, and will and will
and will not budge. That’s how a little grudge
can shake enormous premises: one minute
you are celebrating, and the next —
your Christmas a catastrophe,
your condo just a lean-to.