Breughel

The lump on his neck that no collar

could hide, and the charity of his presence

there in the neighborhood each fall,

door-to-door, standing in the swept porches,

waiting for the housewives to answer.

The ugly, pitiable treeman, reddish and leathery

from the sun. His baseball cap pulled tight

over his head, the visor stiff as a beaver’s tail.

Year after year, the bowsaw with its wide

teeth and the long-handled toppers were all

that announced his trade. And standing on the porch

he advised nothing, though he coughed and hacked,

covering his mouth with his sap-blackened fist

and waited for the infrequent yes that sent him

up the trunk and into the solid lap of the branches,

where he clipped and sawed the bony leafless rigging

until the tree, all torso—lung and heart, ribs

and hips and shoulders—, stood like a knotted

goblet in the yard, a figure, as in allegory,

of his own stunted self, rooted, alive.

My mother tried hard to convince us we were all

children of God and that the sick and maimed, the poor,

were creatures born to special destinies so unique

we could not understand. But who could understand

pain’s redemptiveness and how it rarely seemed

to translate into grace. The poor were always poor,

the sick, sick—just as the treeman’s goiter

did not respond to treatment, inscrutable, part

of God’s plan, part of the unlovely element of love:

the humbling, the pity, the scar of violence—

a craving too frightening to name, or too tender,

the way the treeman bundled the trimmings in twine

and hauled them to the alley. And as if he counted it

his real work, leaned against the fence and with his fingers

picked the dogged sap from the blade and with a file sharpened the teeth.

Source: Poetry (November 1992)