"Helluva tale. Sounds like the kind of mystery and mischief I was drawn to as a 9 y/o"
Christopher Mele. Senior Staff Editor, New York Times.
A brigade of large elm trees
stands at attention along 19th Avenue Southeast.
They are my trees.
I have a right to them.
They give me bark
to stack miniature rustic cabins with.
They whisper raspy nonsense to me
in the long summer breeze.
In winter their austere pattern
of branches against the slate sky
forms a blank bleak stained glass window.
Black carpenter ants busy themselves
crawling endlessly up and down their
trunks on business so important they
do not stop to succor a
fellow ant when I incinerate
it with my magnifying glass.
Dried elm leaves smell like mummies in
a hayloft.
Rain dropped and filtered
through elm leaves
tastes of melancholy.
Baby robins fall from their
elm tree nests in the spring
to leer at me with the grotesque
mask of death. Their huge
black eyes shut,
never to open.
The elms have devious roots
that upset the sidewalk slabs
rendering my roller skates useless.
Harshly the smoke of fallen elm leaves
burning on my front lawn
snakes through the neighborhood
snakes around the elm trunks
erasing homes, cars, people --
isolating me in a smothered silence
like an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Out of this spectral fog
leaps Wayne Matsuura
to push me into a red currant bush,
yelling "Gotcha!"
Bleeding red currant juice
I curse him with childish fervor:
"You dopehead! You scared a brownie
out of me!"
Laughing uproariously
we scuffle in the ash of elm leaves.
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