Old Fence Oak Friends

"–Trail crew foreman says they finally got wise
to making trails low on the outside, so water
can run off good – "

– Gary Snyder, from "Walking the Long and Shady Elwha"









Assignment for today's work is get inside the roadside prairie where sumac, dogwood and bittersweet have taken over, cut it, stack it, treat it with herbicide if its not predicted to rain today or the next day.

Get rid of the road.
Lift off the visitor center.
Do away with the country club
we can see peak up out of the scrub trees
just across the street –

then it's just you and us,
old oaks there in a line as they were
planted a hundred years ago
by the farmer along a fence
all gone now but the disturbance.

When you hunch down
to lop at the base of the dogwood,
you're right inside the old,
because all of the other stuff
floats off, time itself, evaporates,
I know that I'd be lookin out
over natural prairie
goldenrod hard to chop down
no matter what
while you harness your horse
to pull up these rocks.  Not your fault you put the plow on through the panorama the pied beauty.
What's beauty with crying mouths
out along the shed, mud on dead boots,

hot heat, the kind with no conditioned sleep,
coffee two hours earlier
still stinging in your gut
sky closing down on your
because something's coming,
boil water,
hide the deer,
mosquitos will eat you up.

Remember when you stack the dogwood you have to separate out the bittersweet tendrils, the manager tells us, and pull back through the limbs of the dogwood with slender vines circling around and around in spirals, choking off the life of the limb. Vines go in separate piles to get burned.

One of the volunteers
wearing shorts not pants
walks through a low-lying mass
of broadleaf green and thorn thicket.
Might be ivy.
He keeps on going through.
He bends down to scratch.

Good friends old oaks have never moved.