The snow flies away from it. From the chainsaw, too, leaping
as if from a doomed ship, a ship becoming memory and history
in newsreels. Will it bleed? Think of fire; think of a wood
consumed, devoured whole by an animal that breathes, that
eats, that fucks, bears progeny. Don’t believe them when they
say it’s something else.

The man himself: the V of his back is swallowed at its vertex
by love handles, a paunch. His headphones. His goggles, and
in them, the image of his frozen work. A woman is climbing
from the block. That is her hair. Watch the thrill of his arms
like that from a jackhammer. This is something to know. This
is taking a simple thing, a thing you’ve held in monkey hands
and witching it to another life.

There is a green in the air. It is not the green of cut grass. The
East Coast summer seethes from sidewalk cracks. Heat shudders
in the air, yawns like the beast of summer. Winter and light are
conjured to a parking lot for sacrifice to the sun. Forget this thing
for fifteen years or so.