I watched a man cut down a tree.

I watched a man cut down a tree.

Giant chunks of what was obviously flesh fell with sickening, earth-shaking thuds.

The crane stretched out its flimsy steel neck, preposterous.

The growl of the chainsaw chewing through the years; the vomitous spew of sawdust; the inaudible yet piercing shriek as his hungry machine deftly carved through toothsome rings of history—the rush of air that was time sprinting backwards, clocks unwinding as this little man brandished his machine.

And then there lay before me that internal spiral, so like a fingerprint. Or a marbled slice of ham. Hearty slabs of fresh white pine meat, blood-sap trickling from clean wounds.

And it was my job to clean up, to load the truck.

Why?
“It’s sick.”

This midget God pointed his finger and made it so.
Down fell a century, at least, of life.

Those whom we call Trees, whose beauty we breathe, have long been forgotten, like grandparents we never write letters to.

One must admire their rootedness—how they stand like raised hairs growing from the follicles of the earth, while little We scurry freely like lice, dwarfed by those imposing figures who tower tall and erect as skyscrapers (but of course it was the other way around, for that is all we do: we mimick, we mutilate. We climb, with saws and rancor—We Came, We Sawed, We Conquered! But never saw—they couldn’t see. We never sow the seeds; they sawed. They said, “It’s sick,” and so they sawed [not saved] and David slayed Goliath with a simple stone).

I watched a man cut down a tree, defying what should have been impossible odds.
A tree so tall, a man so small.
Who or what is this man?
Man exhales a thick poison cloud, shits metric tons of sewage, pisses hormones into the drinking water... Man is all of us together, and when you are a part of Man, the very act of existence is an act of destruction.

There is just no way around it.

I did not weild the saw, I never made a cut—but I stood watching. Tilting my head back, squinting in the sunlight, I watched the whole thing.

And it was my job to clean up, to load the truck.