A forest dies, and the poem answers with a eulogy so solemn it starts to sound suspicious. "Such a noble sacrifice the forest made / in its battle with the saw": the language belongs to war memorials, but the battle is absurdly lopsided, since trees do not fight and a saw does not lose. The poem's central idea grows out of that mismatch. Memorials, it suggests, are what the living build for their own comfort, and they can end up burying the dead a second time. By the last lines the forest has widened into something larger, all the anonymous dead of any kind.
The first stanza is built on a pun. A "plantation of stumps" is literally what a logged forest leaves behind, but "plantation" also hints at tidy planted rows, the way a war cemetery lines up its markers. The deadpan "deserves no less" sounds like an official speech, and the joke is that the tribute is the damage itself. Whoever killed the forest has also supplied its monument.
The second stanza is the poem's boldest move. The flat, pale stumps become "erasers white with chalk," and the image works in several ways. Visually it is exact: a cut stump really does look like a row of blunt white blocks. But erasers exist to remove writing, and the chalk dust on them is the leftover of what they wiped away. They are "erected," a word from monument-building, "in loving forgetfulness / of the blackboard." That phrase is an oxymoron, and it carries the poem's argument. We build the memorial lovingly, yet in doing so we forget what it was for. Judging by the imagery, the blackboard stands for whatever was there before the loss, the written record of the living forest or of any life. Once the stone is up, the writing is gone.
The third stanza changes the scene to a pond, but the logic carries over. "A stone tossed into still water / always lands in the center of a target / of spreading years." It is a little illogical, since the stone makes its own center wherever it lands, and that is the point. Every death is the center of its own widening circles, and the circles are years. The rings also echo the concentric rings inside a stump, so tree, water and time become one pattern. "Target" adds a quiet menace, because something was aimed at, and the ripples fade as they grow wider, which is how grief and memory behave.
Then comes the shortest stanza, only two lines: "how well we know them then / these unknown dead." The paradox is deliberate. Think of the tomb of an unknown soldier: we know nothing about the person, yet we know the ritual, the shape of the monument, the hush. The "then" is ambiguous. It could mean "at that distance in time," or "in that case." And "how well" could be sincere or bitterly ironic, since we may know these dead only as the blank we have learned to honor. The stanza count carries a hint too. Three stanzas of three lines are followed by one of two, as if the final unit has lost a line, the way a stump is what remains of a tree.
The poem has no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation, so it is easy to read it as casual, but the sound is carefully managed. Soft sibilants run through it: "such," "sacrifice," "saw," "stumps," "stone," "still," "spreading." They hush the poem like a whispered service, and the "saw" sits in the middle of them as the one harsh note. The first line has a near-iambic swing (nearly ten stresses of ceremony) that gives the opening its pomp, and the lines then shorten and plainen, and the grand voice drains away just as it does in the imagery. Because nothing is punctuated, each sentence slides into the next, so the stump, the eraser and the ripple seem to turn into one another rather than being compared.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in eleven lines. It borrows the form of an elegy and uses it to ask what elegies are for. It starts as environmental satire and ends as a meditation on memory, and it never raises its voice. The reader is left with one image to turn over: a field of white, flat-topped stumps that looks like a cemetery, a classroom and a pond all at once.