GRIM REAPER

At the beginning of summer solstice,
the tall grasses sizzled in the morning heat,

that snapped and hissed like snakes as I swung the scythe. 

When the shining blade bit hidden metamorphic stone,

the pendulous power reverberated back up the arm like an echo. 

My flanks and arms ached with the long history of a slow dance,

as I wielded the ancient tool, unchanged since the Middle Ages. 

Soon the horses will come down to graze on the bright grass. 

The stout oak-handled scythe, long since replaced 

by a plastic lime green battery-powered strimmer, 

to fell the wild oats and rattlesnake grass reaching skyward.

After a long, wet winter, they are taller than me.

The horses are long gone, at night the deer will browse 

and check on my slow progress as I clear the upper fields. 

Generations of tree swallows attempt to return to the eaves, 

sealed off for decades, genetic memory that deeply embedded.

The crows are upset because I put up the summer tent,

at dawn they share raucous displeasure from the safety of trees,

a hawk circles the deep valley and keens for her lost fledglings, 

the woodpecker drills and probes the depths of the dead pine.

Douglas firs grizzled with lichen, encroach upon the vestiges 

of open space where my grandmother once tended the garden.

Poison oak and coyote bush protect saplings of live oak and pine.

I wake to a primeval silhouette of bachelor deer on the tent walls.

Last winter, a limb from the dead pine sheared off the corner eave 

of the old house, leaving it raw and exposed to the elements.

Nothing much left of the garden except volunteer cherry plums, 

a dying pear tree we cannot save, even with severe pruning,

and the golden delicious apple tree is so far gone, 

only a thin cambium ribbon threads the roots to branches, 

the heartwood of the tree exposed, hosting shelf fungus,

the black cankers having already done their job decades ago. 

How many decades are measured in this garden, the cultivation 

of lifetimes, but the wilderness returns of its own volition.