#this poem was included in the little anthology i made my 12yo for xmas

[elskanellis]

Power Lines

Ada Limón

Three guys in fluorescent vests are taking down a tree along my neighbor’s fence line, which is, of course, my fence line, with my two round-eyed snakes and my wandering raccoon. That is, if you go in for ownership. My, my, my. For weeks the tree they’re cutting grew tight with a neon pink band around its trunk. A marking, so you knew it was going to die. Must have been at least fifty years old, a nonfruiting mulberry with loads of wintercreeper crawling up the bark. Still it hung low by the power lines. Its fruitless limbs leaning over the wire like it didn’t care one bit about power. Just inching up toward the sun under the hackberry. The men are laughing between chain saw growls, the metal jaws of machinery. It is a sound that sounds like killing. I can barely listen, but then they are conversing in Spanish and it brings me a mercy to hear them make a joke about the heat, the lineup of jobs that day. Once my friend Mundo wanted palm fronds for his patio so he put on an orange shirt and climbed a towering palm right in the center of town. No one ever questions a Mexican in an orange shirt, he said, and we clinked glasses around his new tiki bar. My grandfather worked for Con Edison for years. I thought power was something you could control. Something one could do at a desk or on a job site, work in the field of power. Now the tree is gone. The men are gone, just a ground-down stump where what felt like wisdom once was.