You or me

Weed maple tree, how many times have I snipped you and sawn you in order to reopen the sky you want to barricade from me. Today, once more, I've ascended through the foliage to where leafy spears thrust upward like palisades, and Ive sliced them all, plus the limbs they sprouted from. Single-minded they were, without branches or forks. Up, up, up. The topmost leaves on a pedestal ever extending vertically are still juvenile red; the petioles of those leaves also red; the stems growing up as fast as leaping.

I observe up there the marks of my previous violence against you, bark grown around the barkless, cracked stumps of my prior hewings. A sort of madness now seems to have overtaken you. Let the dignified traditional patterns of growth go hang, you have decided, in favor of a concerted rush to the heights.

You're in too difficult a spot for me to cut down. so I have to pollard you periodically. I would rather you simply subside but you've too much vitality for that. Someday I'm going to kill you since you're not going to leave my sky alone. I respect your will to live but I going to have to break it, unless--up in the tree, a branch snaps, a limb butt jumps--and you break mine.