Wendy Taylor Carlisle

and tolerate their small undoings. Larceny and cruelty

in politicians are small undoings. Therefore,

we must be deaf to their clamor and travesty.

We must abstain from returning their half-glance,

which should ricochet off our faces like a penny

off a well-made bed. We must be stone carvings,

resembling the ones at the Palais in Vienna,

leaning, arm around a shoulder,

arm around a waist, balancing prop and lintel

on their heads. Caryatids standing as one

under tons of masonry, bearing up the roof,

waiting for the necromancers’ sway to end,

comforting each other until then.

a grandmother oak laid flat, root ball up,

a symbiotic dogwood flush against its trunk.

The smaller tree emerged years ago,

magicked out of the oak’s colossal side.

The first spring it blossomed, I saluted its tiny crosses.

That December, I hung ornaments and fairy lights

on its delicate limbs, reveled in the notion

that tree could birth disparate tree, that they could coexist.

Soon, the cornel will die with its host and I must attend

their withering. One small loss, I tell myself.

Other green immensities didn’t survive,

nor did Peggy’s havocked house or Larry’s crabapple,

whirled into tango, shedding its flayed boughs.

***

Today’s sky is a disingenuous blue, clear

as a good husky’s eye and I take a breath and resist

the need to talk as if the earth had motive, as if

it were in business to furnish humans quick retribution

for the greed and plunder they provoke when

their expectations of taking exceed what a planet

can possibly give. This wind and hail, the overburdening

rain that loosed tremendous roots,

there is no mind in it. Wanton teardown goes on

without will, at its own glacial pace, not in an instant

like a lighting-bearing god, but soon enough the globe

will push us from its soil, same as it wrestled out

the grandmother oak, and we will wane like the dogwood,

grasping sustenance from a dying host.