Felling the Tree

by Hastings Hensel Each ring a year we cut into, open up, hacking back every hour the decades. We keep on, stroke after tiring stroke— wedge, push, cuss, talk about chainsaws that would show the tree’s history as cleanly as a timeline in a textbook. What makes us want to labor in camp— an afternoon through blisters, bees, heat— for a climax so brief? Half an hour in, and what? We chop through to 1998: Sosa homering, McGwire homering, James Byrd dragged through Texas by four white men in a pickup truck, and the two of us, fifteen, learning how to unclasp our girls’ padded bras in empty dugouts on a Friday night. It is concentration honed by the blade, and these damp chunks of brown wood that splay out like seconds with each chop. Tell me, friend, what hard knot keeps it up? Why does this hemlock not fall down until your last tragic swing of the axe and the quick, loud crash of a thing the same dead age as our grandfathers? Tell me again what we are left with but a stump, some kindling, the half-life of a life? We are left with our voices drifting like ash by the necessary firelight. Hastings Hensel lives in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, and his writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Shenandoah, Gray's Sporting Journal, The Hopkins Review,