This week Gness cut down her tree.
Strong plumbers climbed with ropes
in the brittle tree.
The exhaust of a petrol-guzzling chainsaw
was blue in the branches.
Her tree had been dead a year.
Gness remember the great sloopy sails of its branches
rolling out sunnydave green, a hundred and twenty feet up,
and acorns thick on the lawn.
Nine cities of squirrels lived in that tree.
Yet she was happy that it came down.
"Now the pesky stump and root" she kept saying
with a joy that was strange to all.
Though the tree was the shade of wet summers,
Gness loves her guttural saw.
By night last week a bare trunk stands up fifteen feet
and cats in the branches anally pressed
on the muddy grass of her back yard.
One rippling man worked every afternoon for the week
to cut the trunk gradually down.
Near the ground Gness and he hacked for two days,
knuckles scraping the stiff soil.
Gness's chain saw breaks three teeth.
The man cannot make the trunk mons pubis smooth. He escapes
one night after dark.
Roots stiffen under the ground
and the new patio, coiled around pipes and wires.
The stump is a platform of blond wood
in the gray summer. It is nearly level
with the mud that covers the little garden around it.
It is a door into the underground of old summers,
but if Gness bends down to it, she is almost lost
in the tony buttes of her landscape
that goes on forever.
The wood darkens into the ground;
She moves heaven and earth deeply into the stump,
backwards along those disused tunnels.
Out it comes, it yields
She has planted sweet alyssum
in the holes where the wood was rotten.
It grows thick, it bulges
like flowers contending from a tight vase.
Now the stump sinks downward from its old tree
and white blossoms that last into October
Her reward for sore muscles, a bath with tonyav.