KEVIN PRUFER
All of the names have been changed
Someone had entered the yard that night
In order to protect the innocent,
My mother, we’ll call her Cynthia,
Was in the kitchen watering the plants
That decorated the country house windows
When suddenly she heard a sawing from the woods,
This is a true story,
Out back behind the house
When a strange man
Cut the largest tree with a crash into the moss
And such a cloud of dust and birds
Rose to the treetops and beyond
*
Mine was the wisp of hair that came lovingly to her cheek
Mine was the breath against the silk of the blouse
But whose was the saw that leveled the tree,
And the second tree? One by one,
The trees fell, and this, a true story,
Though the names have been changed,
The two of us afraid, in a way,
In the dark, even to open
The front door and call into the black woods,
Though I, only a child, we’ll call me
By my own name,
And she, Cynthia, tangled in all this
Watering can in hand, paused
Over the spider plant and the dishes not even done,
The Jeep parked on the gravel drive,
Not a telephone between there and town,
And my father—we’ll call him that—
Who knew what he was thinking
At that very moment What could we do? So
To protect the innocent
We turned off the house lights one by one
Locked the doors as, at that very moment,
A laughing from the woods just outside the house
*
Difficult to describe, though it sounded not unlike
The sound of the saw if I must make it clear
Up, up into the attic we crawled
And out with those lights, too, until
In retrospect, in the darkness,
There were so many things that horrible year:
The bursting of dams, my brother also gone, the letters
Always laughing in the mailbox, and forever somewhere
Someone, anonymous, hungry
Mine was the crying into Cynthia’s skirt,
Mine was, finally, the lost-in-sleep
In the air beneath the attic window,
With the nameless man in the yard,
That, by sunup, was scattered with the black half-fingers
Of this, the strange true story, the remains of our trees.