020209192004
They killed the apartment dog piss tree.
Which apartment dog piss tree?, you ask,
and it is a good question, to which the best
answer is the stunted and dead one, that they
sawed off and hauled away today, unseen,
from Harvard Street, leaving only the pale circle
of concentric rings exposed to the whipping
winds of Alabama, the grudging spatter of fat
gulf coast drops, to the summer storm bringing
its autumnal breeze, nestled in that fresh
rectangle of mulch, soaked by days of rain.
All the trees are apartment dog piss trees in the city.
This tree, this twenty year old pin oak, hardly past
sapling, lived, its brief adolescent life, in the baking sun
and raking wind, on a barren side of the apartment
block, where the basement door and convenience
store are located, so the tenants can take the dogs
out morning and evening without passing through
the guarded lobby’s potential censure. Right there!
Not twenty paces from the door, the first, the only
tree! It must be, for them, every day, like men at
rest stops on the interstate, pretending not to rush
urgent to the vacant urinal, never mind the smell,
like those desolate miles before the turnoff, all day
everyday, until the Lord comes back and
takes them out the basement door. The smells.
It must be – it must have been, although a dying,
poisoned, and finally dead tree, a bulletin board
for them, the apartment dogs, who rarely saw
one another, and when they did were constrained
by the leashes and the grim limits of the Lords
from unabashed sniff and nip, growl and play in
the fullness of language; who rarely saw one
another, but each posted a note, and read previous
posts twice a day outside the basement door, at the
apartment dog piss tree that has been dead since last fall.
There was drought and heat for a couple years.
They told us not to wash cars or water lawns, and
the landscaping companies worked nights, before
heavy metal measurements led instead to the order
to buy ten-minutes flush time before drinking.
I think that apartment dog piss was the only thing
that adolescent oak got to soak up those summers,
and it and the baking heat of the road and concrete,
its insufficient allotment of dirt, killed it. I sat in
the coffee shop patio, adjacent to that basement
door and convenience store, a year long deathwatch
with the proprietor. When the grandfather on the
corner came down in the big blow last summer with
all its motley vines, turning up the sidewalk corner
of the park and the street with its small, brittle root
ball – even emaciated and rotted that great lever
pried up the city like so much dirt, a petite concrete
collar hanging from the fallen trunk – then, all shade,
all hope of brief afternoon shade, and windbreak, was lost
for the apartment dog piss tree, which, at the time,
seemed to be dead but for one rugged branch, greenly
aspiring among the other desiccated shoots.
That branch did not bud in the glare with grandfather
gone and all the toxic doses of canine messages—is
this what telephones, antennae, and switching stations
endure, resistance in the lines and the attrition of time,
or is thoughtless apartment dog piss arboricide
something more culpable—not that the health of the
tree in any way affected its efficacy as a bulletin board.
Did the dogs notice that the tree was dead? Their Lords
did not, hardly noticed when the dog pissed at all, self-
absorbed schizophrenics babbling alone but for the
hands-free set clipped to an ear claiming sanity. I watched.
I talked to Eddie about it, at the coffee shop on
several occasions. I would say some thing like “Goddamn
if that isn’t the sorriest apartment dog piss killed tree
I’ve ever seen,” and he’d say “It’s always something,”
reminding me of my own grandfather. Just yesterday,
I said to him, as we sat, huddling against the chill
wind between torrents with our coffee, I smoking and
he opening a fresh Marlboro pack, I said,
“Those cruel people can keep coming down here
trying to poison that tree, but they’ll never do it any
more harm, Eddie.”
“Damn, those people have no sense,” said Eddie,
standing up. He walked to the gate, crumpling the plastic
and foil wrapper of his cigarette pack in his hand, “They’ve
got no sense of perspective,” and flung it across the span
of the sidewalk—twice the depth of the piss oak’s plot—
toward the gutter, but it was foil and plastic and that face
of the building is the wall of a great windy channel, so, as
he returned to his seat, it blew in among the wet mulch.
“No sense of the consequences of their actions!”
“I hear you, Eddie,” I said. “Even so, it’s a damn
shame about that tree.”