Walnut Tree

For not much more

Than the price

Of a rangy automobile

We bought a walnut tree,

Which, helpfully, came bundled

With antique country cottage,

And sun-favoured garden.

We scarce knew what we had,

For a thrilling decade or two:

Venerable, companionable,

This Earthly benediction.

With dimly-remembered

Boy-scout skills I spliced

Hemp rope and cut oak plank

To make, dangling on

Outstretched blackened limb

A high swing, and then to push

Each new startled child

Into endless shimmering

Mountain blue.

From tender buds in Spring,

It unfurled limpid leaves, new-made,

In bright, fanning, umbrella clumps,

And thrust out rich, swelling nuts,

Erotic, prolific,

Cased in smooth round husks,

Nature’s joyous, naked seed.

How prettily it dappled

The West-leaning, end-of-day light,

To carelessly bestow such favours

As seemed fit. In Autumn we waded

Ankle-deep in soft, moist beds

Of copper-coloured, mouldering leaves,

To gather trays of tender fruit

In deftly-fingered husks.

Until one year quite suddenly,

For every sinuous, anxious branch

There came nor bud, nor leaf, nor nut.

It dawned on us quite slowly,

Our beloved tree was dead.

By clumsy human hand

It may have been (it mattered not),

When conspirators and assassins,

With JCB in adjoining field,

Diverted a watercourse. Yet,

How yearningly we thus decried

Such sheer, pitiable folly

As is human wishes.

“Elle est belle,” let out the mill owner

Genuflecting, as it were,

As full-girth trunk rolled heavily

To sweet-scented, saw-dusty floor.

With consummate skill he cut,

A fragrant stack of wide, wide handsome boards,

In whose dark and swirling grain

With eddies, like richest marble cake,

I exulted: this beneficence, this Afterlife.