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.