Poems

Our resident beaver heads out at dawn, eager to surveil its water kingdom, repeats the circuit when dusk tints the sky. He swims unhurried along the marsh line, marking the willows he plans to gnaw into submission when darkness falls. Last autumn he stripped the banks, even took down the American Olive, despite the fencing wound like a hug around the branching trunk. His regal laps announce that he is emperor of his domain, his tail slap a stern warning that in this natural

Two days of cloudy skies and sporadic rain, then the sun returns, sends a beam across the back yard, fires the geraniums squatting next to the blistered Charleston bench. Still cool, low 60’s at 7 a.m. The early morning dip a predictable lull before the dog day begins. In the garden, asters stretch knee-high, the dogwood sets spring blooms, petunias and begonias burn calendar-bright. It is August 6, the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, weldin

We pay to have the scruffy yews replaced by red elf coreopsis and balloon flowers, the dwarf variety, each cutting selected for its sweet bee perfume, the whole fenced in by fuschia-bright phlox. It’s a good plan, well-researched and weed-tended, until the morning I spy a wild invader’s stalk, rising like a Trojan horse with spine so tall it quickly outpaces the lame domesticated roots, races upward, one foot, two, ten, each leap a succulent invitation to butter

The farmlands are mostly gone now, paved over, plowed under, transformed by tar and girded by concrete and order. But there, on the curve of the cul-de-sac, the wild creeps in. Mansions consume large lots, sport cultured lawns awash with weed killer that seeps and runs and strangles the native flowers, but deep within the curated grass, the wild creeps in. The wooded groves, the prairie fields struggle to retain purchase amid the plats with throwback names: Settler’s Walk