The Forester

We talk of shit—
the coyote’s, smack in the middle of the trail.
Or moose droppings, discovered after his dog
rolled in a pile, ecstatic.
I thought we were mostly safe.

But he points to loose limbs caught
in the crown of a tree
and calls them widow makers.
Shows me, too, the deadly tension
of spring poles—young saplings, bent over.

In the forestry service,
these details kept him alive.
But on a casual stroll in the woods,
it’s alarming. We pass a red maple
and I say its Latin name,

acer rubrum, the only one I recall.
He knows the rest, and recites them
as their ancient names hang in the air.
Once, on the shore of a mountain lake
after a swim, he found a leech on the back

of my leg, and calmly slid a fingernail
under the sucker and tossed it away.
At first I thought he might know too much,
had seen too much, to enjoy the woods,
but it’s not that—

to hear him talk about tree diseases,
the blights and bleeding cankers,
molds, rots, and fungi, the strange poetry
of declines and diebacks—
it’s the chance of harm amid such beauty.

What we can manage, and what is beyond us.
One night over drinks, he told me a story
from years of fighting wildfires out West—
as his crew set up a fire break, a rabbit bolted
from the flames, burning alive, seconds from death.

Someone laughed. Others pretended
they didn’t notice. All these years later,
one of the saddest things he’d ever seen.
I’m not sure how to explain it, he told me.
It was just a rabbit, he said. But it was on fire.