Crew Boss
Hail and wind pound the garden
into confetti, blow smoke from August fires,
smash a giant willow onto the footbridge.
Work all day with the city crew,
noisy diesels and chainsaws;
log chains dangle tree trunks
above our heads.
A brass belt buckle flashes
beneath the crew boss's vest:
Yeah, it's a turtle. Mexico,
five dollars thirty-five years ago.
I do things like a turtle,
always drive five miles under the limit.
Women, everyone, passes me
uphill on the double yellow line.
I'm still learning to go slow.
End of the day,
give him a copy of Snyder's Turtle Island.
He knows work, I say.
And studied Buddhism in Japan.
I don't have much religion,
Crew Boss says,
but you know, when I bought my ranch
a large beaver was there
and he had a beaver house near the river
that was big enough to stand up in, really.
I took a heavy bar and a shovel
and went down there and broke it all in,
broke it down and filled it with dirt.
In the next week he dug it all out
and I realized I'd been wrong
so I fenced off that section
and I call it Beaver's Acre
I'm more or less isolated, mind you,
and I like it that way,
if you know what I mean,
but I owed him that much.
from On the Chinese Wall - New & Selected Poems 1966 — 2018
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