The tree men came with ropes and saws,  
with peppery voices high in their throats, 
and cut the sky a little bigger, just for now.  
That day, suits back east were promising 
to make all our lives better, never mind 
where we live or what we do. Painted lies, 
from some of them; from others, tribal calls 
to hate and lock away, like scavengers' 
summoning of the rabble to fresh kills. 

Meanwhile from my drying summer woods 
a dirt-brown doe minced down the creek bed, 
through blackberry thickets and a fence gap 
toward the happy blossoms of my roses, trapped 
in earthen pots. The tender buds could not run off  
and flee the shadow-colored wraith of deep-lit eyes 
& cloven hoof, that sawed its velvet jaws from side to side
(herbivore's warp-&-woof) and ate my luckless prizes.

The tree men in their big-heeled boots and denim 
never knew about these votes alternative 
being cast around, above, below them, for 
another kind of freedom. Their blue-collar sweat 
damped the air, while up from hell a gopher 
ploughed the tender nethers of my cultivated beds.  
It slaughtered a tomato—bit quite through 
the innocent and unprotected roots, 
transplanted but not-yet-spread-out largess. 	

I couldn't even watch the deed be done 
in earth's primary gloom. Nor see  
the ivory yellow buckteeth, bullet head, 
the fat-cheeked earless insolence of rodent visage. 
I mourned the limp green carcass (slightly fuzzy) 
wilted like a maiden on its cage, and gnashed 
my first-world teeth in proprietary frustration. 
Then to render grief more cursory,  
I hied me to the West End Nursery.