The Subjunctive

Had my brother and I not planted

the pine saplings we brought home

from school forty years ago,

had we not watered them and spread

fertilizer around the roots, the yard

of the house we grew up in would not

have smothered under a blanket of cracked

and fallow needles. Were it not for their

height, their naïve placement beneath

the power lines, too near the neighbor’s

fences, his widow would not have had them

cut to stumps, their irregular rings

bared and countable. I wish they were

not—then would I not return there

almost every winter looking for what

once was, a bright future coming

toward us, we thought, to bathe us

in its light like water, not sever us

with its lightning like a chainsaw.