While dusk’s last hour ladders down 
the redwood’s sticky branches, wrens 
that seek a home for one night’s wintering
gather like constellations of thought to sweep in
abruptly, lighting in the limbs, chattering until
they fold the small envelopes of their wings and calm.
It’s easy, watching March give way to April,
imagining this tree, planted years ago, 
as shelter for my mind that’s bearing in tonight 
from many miles, over the coastal range, 
down long fields combed black by plows,
to course near, skittish and
unsure, along the roof tops’ edges.

Evenings things cross over, the bats’ looping, palsied scrawls
across the darkened blue, scarves of wood smoke the chimneys’ 
loose, though no clouds tonight, nor the souls some imagine.
There’s a hollow in the trunk, the size a small fist would make
punched into a pillow, or the place I made as a child
inside myself for things I grieved, everything I was told
to let go for good like this wind’s long drifting.
The tree points out the stars looking finely nettled 
and thorny so, if you could, you’d handle them carefully 
because they’re sharp and can’t last, because it’s
only loveliness that hurts to lose.

April my mother died, propped
like a doll by pillows of needlepoint 
I’d watched her make in a rented hospital bed. 
The lumps she allowed I touch and that gave her eyes 
their lacquered look felt to me just a few runt onions going bad. 
The day she left for good I was late, wandering from school, 
distracted by the leaves, tiny flags unfurling, curious 
about the snails’ small armadas crossing rain-slicked walks.
  
That spring’s quiet surprise 
was that my father never spoke of her.
Maybe he thought the times he held my eyes with his, 
dead light there traveling out into mine,
was the full measure of my need, or, maybe, he couldn’t
think about anybody anymore. That year I helped him 
and my uncles, clearing orchards of figs planted
long ago in the yellow hills of grass that swell 
toward the coastal range on the far side of the valley.
Pleasure for a boy was laying in a saw just above the trees’ 
arthritic knuckles. Sometimes the wood, knotted and thick, 
would baulk, buck me to my knees, and the chained teeth 
rip free until they bit the ground, my trigger finger shuddering 
loose to leave me shaking, tired, yet somehow proud, too, 
that I was old enough for a world I now knew could be killing. 

Most birds fled at the machine’s first ratcheting. Though
sometimes the chicks of sparrows, jays, woodpeckers, 
spotted as the chests of Indian ponies,
white and orange and black were shook to squeaking in their nests, 
and floundering, drew down the adults to try to blind us with a beak
or snip an ear, the flickers feigning hurt, stuttering in the air
to draw us off.  

But work is work, and we could build
an acre of twisted waste in a day, piece the bigger 
limbs for stove wood, truck it off and burn the rest.  
The birds stayed and shrieked, wreathing above 
the rolling smoke while I watched, a man-boy lost, 
and harder ever after to find, some of my parts 
gone out into the eyes of birds, 

the flame-licked limbs, the smoke.
I gathered them into that chamber I’d needed and so had 
constructed, neatly, behind a rib. But they don’t stay put 
and like all I’ve lost, fly in and out, quickly 
as my mother’s hand-looped stitches. 
On a night like this, I see about this tree, shadows 
the size of hands coming and going, and feel, as each  
reaches the apex of its swing, the thread pulled tight,
and then, again, the needle homing.