November 24, 2023An Act of Sabotage
Because I was young and heretical
(I wanted to be a radical) I spiked
trees to save them. This, I was told,
was the right thing to do: each tree
found with a spike ruins the forest
around it. It wasn’t true, of course.
The lumberjack’s logic (practical)
is to find the spike, cut beneath it.
But being young and eager to see
myself in the act of saving trees,
I whacked nails into bark at my height
and felt very militant and right.
Years later, I met a man with a missing
thumb (half of one hand was gone)
and still being young, I asked him
what had happened. I was cutting wood,
he told me. A nail in a log wrecked
the chain off the saw and whipped
his hand clean through—so now
he rides a mower for the church.
Though it was many years before
and somewhere else, I felt ashamed:
a man’s life (possibly) for a tree
that would be cut down anyway.
What dumb advice! I remembered
the man who had given it to me:
mid-thirties, moustached, with wrap-
around sunglasses and a sleeveless T,
holding a paddle (he was a river guide,
we were in a rubber raft) who leaned in
to whisper the name of his group
(Earth First! but don’t tell anyone)
and offer useful tips for conspiring:
sugar in gas tanks destroy engines,
loosened lug nuts topple trucks,
flames ruin wood raped from the earth.
And, of course, spiking trees:
an effective means to defend against
the enemy. I sat before the enemy,
ashamed, and told him what I’d done
years before. He told me not
to worry—I’d botched the job,
and anyway, the nail he hit was one
he’d put there himself and then forgotten,
but chainsaws are smarter now,
so deaths and injuries are rare,
though he agreed that I was right
to feel like an asshole. There are
better ways to save the earth, he said.
There was a shadow on the field
from a cloud that had grown heavy
while we were talking, and were it not
for the wind it might have rained.
I could hear the cries of the gulls
from the sea beyond the hill,
and the bell of a church began to ring.
Later that night my father made
a fire in a ring of stones.
Flames tongued out of the wood
like sea anemones searching for food.
We had chosen nature, the quiet
burning of expired stars
in a place without a roof, where
the rushing of the surf was our radio.
To keep warm, we burned wood
and talked about the future,
which seemed far away, theoretical,
and entered into a new conspiracy,
a dream in which we were happy
and our existence felt justified
and good, because we were moral
people, and the trees forgave us
our sins, because they understood.
from #81 - Fall 2023