ON THE EDGE OF EDEN
or
MAKING FRIENDS
DOWN AT THE MITIGATION SITE
After forty-five years of storm, collected silt and
sediment, they�ve raised the dam twenty-one feet
to flood volunteer willows, alders and cottonwoods
rooted down to minimum pool
that now require mitigation:
an orchardFor a little honey and a chance to visit over
along the road
along the creek �tangled rows of sycamores,
blackberries, twiggy oaks, mulefat
and much more jungle beneath
the canopies
of a half-dozen trees
centuries old.
a few glasses of homegrown, fresh-squeezed
oranges cut with 100% agave Cazadores
a day or two before Christmas,
Gabe Arroyo keeps his bees on me
next door to this mitigation eyesore,
when they�re not busy
making money in Montana,
resting-up in their white two-storey hives
on pallets stacked alongside new hogwire
stretched so-so � damn sure not tight-enough
to keep bees home when December warms
after an inch of rain to seventy-three degrees.
They�re thinking spring and out-looking for work.
Headquarters � the powers that ultimately
persuade � called about the bees, how
their buzzing bothers the government�s gardeners
planting even more trees. Could I move
the hives to keep these docile souls
out of their trucks? I suggest they wait
for colder days or that they might try
rolling their windows up.
For the record, Gabe�s son-in-law moved the bees up the road a couple of nights later, but as warm as it�s been, I suspect they all didn�t make the trip. Now instead of looking for work, they�re probably looking for a place to live. Baxter could get more rhyming-mileage out of this renewable wealth of material, like the electric fence they thought they finally had �up and working�, but failed to notice that there were no longer any cattle on the other side of it. The beat goes on and we try to get along.