(
Between the barbecue and orderly garden,
the suburban male sprouted on the evening lawn,
his shirt billowing from hoisting branches,
embodied by the changeling wind
that made each mute leaf articulate,
that filled the yard with a tree's proper sound,
and fulfilled the creature wholly fit for treeness,
for bending stasis, for autotrophic life.
His shirt gave up the last,
collapsing like a burial at sea,
and ferried white across
fathoms of full air
to shroud her osteoporotic feet.
Through the fall she watched him defoliate,
wrapped the trunk in burlap
and hung a feeder from a bough extending
past her window.
Gray sparrows sheltered their red burning,
quick on the snow and lignin.
She watched them over liver-spotted hands
molded to cups of tea
against the light that clattered through his limbs
to the crystalline yard.
When his livid green was a mockery,
she rooted for an answer
through his tools in the garage.
The grandchildren found the handle of an ax
gnarled in an oak's raised branch,
and, wafting like drift-nets on the grass,
her exfoliated clothes.
