Originally published in Salamander, Issue #52, Spring 2021
when a tree falls on the house During Plague-time
Everyone said it was the largest tree
they had ever seen on a street
in New York. Some said anywhere. The city
sent a small crane, then its bigger brother; then,
when that was not enough, a third
used for high rises. And the sidewalk
afterwards—undeniable. For weeks
cars stopped to look: the ripped up earth,
like something roiling underneath
had flexed, arched up its back
and broken the pavement
open above it. Or a furious hand
had reached down to twist this one undeserving
colossus out of the earth, leaving a stump
the size of a family breakfast table, the rest
of it taken up to answer for sins
committed with vegetable slowness.
Neither of those are how it happened. A storm
washed through. The tree wavered
and slumped, leaned its head against
the scaffolding on our house. Across the street
the neighbors saw it: like a dancer
reclining, its enormous symmetry
moving away from them
with movie slowness. I heard it,
though asleep—it brushed against
my window, and I woke up and wondered at
thunder that lasted for so long. Then the shouting
of my father, who wanted to know
if I was alive. I was. Outside, the world
had paused from ending. The sky was
bright and gray, and our neighbor Tim,
who manages the nurses in an ER, and who
had been waiting for years
for the tree to come down, cried
with relief because it had only
wrecked his roof and only on
one side. His front garden was
a chamber of hanging branches
grazing the ground all around him, like
the inner sanctum of a weeping
willow, and from inside he beckoned
my mother over and told her
a secret: that his house
had a cellar, but ours didn’t, because a river
ran under it, and the tree had been born
on top of it, and had fed on it,
and grown huge, and towered
over everything around it; but they
enclosed the river in a pipe
a long time ago, and the tree
had been standing there since,
looking for a way back with its roots
and dying, for a hundred years.