Tree Burning

I remember watching my father burn
our Christmas tree.

He took it out of the house.
It was shedding needles
and dry twigs all over
the tiles.
He had it half covered in
a pale red plastic bag he got in the attic.

My mother followed him with the vacuum cleaner
until it didn’t reach anymore.
Then she unplugged the thing
and put it back in closer to
the laundry room where the cats
were balled up for warmth.

He dragged it through the door
and into the garage.
He yelled something when
the bag came off
and left it there
under the car tire.

One cat looked at it,
pawed it,
then crawled into it
and went to sleep.

Down a short hill he went.
His hat was almost off his head.

There was no snow
and a bright night sky.
A big white moon.

He took it all the way out to a field
by the stub and
when he dropped it down and it went
half flat into the ground.

I could not hear him out there.
His movements were quiet,
his breathing quiet.

He did not light it directly
but took a rolled up slip of newspaper,
lit the end of that
then applied the flaming tip to a few
different parts of the tree.

It went up slowly first
then all of a sudden
as my father walked backwards
away,
grew so fast into one
immense flame
that I put my arm up in front of my face.

It towered in the middle I’d say
to almost 20, 30 feet.

It was the biggest flame I’d ever seen.

I must have been standing
more than 50 feet away
as I was instructed to do
but
I still felt the heat.
I held out the palms of my hands to warm them. It worked almost too well.

The sound was this terrible
crackling.

The tree had become so dry because
he stopped watering it
the day after Christmas.

Pieces of the tree glowed
and started floating off into the purple air.
The crackling continued and my father
stood aside with a bucket of water
in case something happened or
got out of control.

It did not take long, though.

Soon the whole thing shrank
and cooled and I couldn’t feel it anymore.

Once it was allowed,
I walked closer
and stood over the burnt
husk and embers.

It became little
and nothing then
to me.

A cold little heart.
A cold, dark body.