To poke around and look at their condition
Past the blackberry vines, purple as veins
And pushing up to leaf and then fruition
Wolfberries and their sage-like leaves budding
Against the inevitable greening of the holler
The equines' gift, waiting to be scooped
And wedded to red clay in beds we'll build,
Will boost the soil that cradles living food
A post that might have stood in Cymru or
In Eire, but instead supports the sky
In the southerness of this southern South
This comforter of living moss upon
A log was never knot by hands like ours
The horse and donkey, in their less-than-patient
Hours, crib the bark from sapling trees,
Forgetting that their master never fails
To bring them better fare than what they've stripped
The first unnamed wildflowers, sneaking
Past the forest's carpeting of mast
Past the forest's carpeting of mast
A souvenier from Angus, as he sought
Relief from itching hide along the barbs
A grapevine traps a tulip poplar in
A love-knot more secure than man can tie
An Irish tangle of rooted green wood
And supple conduit feeding in damp earth
Waiting on the eastern hill, a choir
Of baritones and basses lifts a dirge
The mystery of whorls of paper, chewed
And formed as walls by mouths of deadly livestock
And near my place of prayer hangs a rack of
Cruel thorns, fit for royal apparel
Like whispered memory, a cherry blossom
Lifts from tree-joint to the warming air
Fungi on a long-ago felled log
Troop in scalloped grandeur to the ground
Moss-draped rocks, hunched like monks beneath
The branches where they chant their canticles
The branches where they chant their canticles
And finally, God's gift of bookends at Five
Pines, beside some ramps, upon the straw.
Rest well, loved ones.
