Silver Maple

e two women are back in the red pickup. It’s their third truckload of rewood today.

is time I say, Hey, while unloading groceries, seeking an a rmative head nod

or something. ey’re back to haul free wood

after a storm took down a silver maple that used to branch like an open palm outside my window.

Look, I know there’s a too-easy metaphor here about what they lift together into the atbed and haul home,

how it will warm them— how it does warm them twice—

here as they work, heating the skin beneath their clothing, and a second time when the wood is dry enough to burn.

e heat between them isn’t what draws me back. It’s the choreography they have down:

how the taller one shifts her hips as the two study the stacked pile.

en, her partner, restless to get the job done, hikes her jeans up by the loops and reaches with ambition

for a wedge of the rough-cut trunk, intuiting as she loses balance

that a second set of hands will be there for the assist. And she’s right.

Once I showed you how to build a camp re beginning with kindling.

Or you humored my performance of mastery, as we built a pyramid

together out of sticks, cupped the ame, kept it going as long as there was fuel for it.

Now, I am the clumsy partner to my own grief. I circumvent what’s missing

from many paces away—

It must have been a large tree once, the taller woman says to me squinting up, trying to picture it from below.