Something from Nothing

Chris Ellery

April 21, 2024

The arborist is here with his crew, 

pruning and feeding, trying to coax

a few more years from a red oak 

damaged by ice and lightning. 

It will either make it, or it won’t.

That’s what he says, looking at me, 

an old man touching the sky

of my seventieth winter, a mere child 

to the tree, my old friend, wise and good 

at listening, good at gathering birds 

among its limbs to sing in the wind.

I dread to see the chainsaw and the shredder. 

With a past so long—deciduous decades 

of greening and changing—it’s hard 

to imagine my yard without certain things.

Acorns. Owl’s nest. Hatchlings. Shade.

Now the future shows me an emptiness

where nothing will be. Nothing. 

No thing. Yet nothing, I know, 

is something, too—

an opening for light and wind, 

room for something new to grow, 

a space for kids to run and play, 

a point from which 

someone might view at the end of the day 

the glory of the moonrise 

or the setting sun.

Chris Ellery is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body and Elder Tree. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, the Betsy Colquitt Award, and the Texas Poetry Award.