DeLand, Florida.  Mid-Summer.  Sunday Noon.

Rocking away on our front porch below
our camphor tree’s cool aromatic shade,
Papa and Mom (with her Aunt Blanche in tow)
sipped their iced tea — as chirping crickets played.
Aunt Blanche and Mom just loved to ruminate
on Gardening’s ways, on Nature’s, and on God’s.
(They read theology, and pondered fate,
deploring how we lived behind facades.)

A red-tailed hawk plunged down, flapped up — prey squirrel’s
broken-off shriek hushing tree folk with fright.
Aunt Blanche’s face turned ghostly white.  The pearls
she wore acquired a preternatural light.
“Blanche, you OK . . . ?” asked Papa.  “The hawk, too,
is Nature’s Way . . . the squirrel’s cry, ‘Adieu’.”

Hard News For The Macmanns

Near DeLand, Florida.  Fall, 2006.

The landscape gardener swept his gnarled hand
with feeling up and down the camphor’s trunk.
“Just south of your new home’s front porch you’d planned
to move this ten-foot tree?  It’s no slam-dunk.

It would indeed give you a fragrant shade,
attaining forty feet. But I’ve no brute-
sized root-balling machine with enough blade
to dig down past its tap — its only — root.

Injure the tap root’s tip and it will die —
or leastwise all my own transplants have failed . . . .”
He picked a leaf and sniffed it with a sigh.
He crinkled it and smiled as he inhaled.

“I know how you’d enjoy your porch, improved
with shade that’s fragrant — but, it can’t be moved.”

Frontier Talk

You crave attention?  So’s your axe.  Split wood.
Reload the kitchen stove so we can eat.
And stop complaining you’re misunderstood.
Don’t think your tongue’s so golden.  Goats will bleat.
An omelet and some onions browned ’til sweet
is all, for sure, you’ll get from me tonight — 
you needn’t put on you’re all that contrite.