It wasn't the dream of the enormous spruce tree
to be turned into fifty reams of paper
then stacked and cut and bound into 4” X  6” format pages,

and printed with the sentences
of a seething hot romance novel
called Summertime Nurses.

Season after season, while the tree was growing tall,
while it breathed and swayed among its brethren other trees,
it wasn't dreaming of becoming the delivery device

for a steamy bedroom episode
in which the small deft hands of someone named Brittany
"unbuttoned her jeans with feverish impatience."

Oh tree, you were part of the forest for years,
bending and straightening and bending
like the mast of a great ship —
tasting the earth with your long dark roots.

That was a different story indeed
from the one printed on page 38
in which the exchange student from Norway

enters the dark lounge of the Carterville Inn,
and just stands there like Apollo by the Budweiser sign
inflaming the entire female populace of Tweedy County.

When the tree was cut down and hauled away to the mill
to be turned into Summertime Nurses,
we lost part of our Eden

worth more than a paperback;
the tree, swaying all day in the sun,
rocked and pushed by the wind,

yielding and tousled under the white clouds,
with all of its arms outstretched,
all of its mouths wide open.