Covenant

…trees are rooted to the ground, they die looking out at the sights they were born to.
                                   Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

And in this way they shadow us rooted to the shrinking land—
     we who are farm-acquainted with the now dieback daylight, unpredictable

                            wild-card-if of steady weather;

a covenant drawn up long ago
      in this lovely California golden-boast of stubbornness

             by those who came before to winnow barley, oats and wheat and hunt
                  for springs,
to unabashedly experiment with fruit trees, turkeys, goats and geese....

(though some have called us heirs    absorbed and ugly bores, scavengers,
     hangers on….)

our devotion is sometimes a net loss but isn’t nature-duty full of unpredictability
like a marriage bed;
       
                and yet a committed heart keeps marching on if only a hare’s-
                     breath 

like forests do, (scientists have said)
 
 a half-mile a year north for (maybe-guaranteed) survival

a tiny unsung odyssey,   a whisper-hymn
           as we stewards with not much assurance

 march as well, which means our own baby-voyage out

(sad whine of machines going anywhere)

not altogether carefree (no trips to Hawaii planned, no plane rides releasing
     more
    carbon into the fucked-up heavens) but one hour, two hour

 back- gutted

road retreat to the please- arrive-early feed store to purchase the up-
     in-price -now

seed-sacks

    in order to plant the pastures with the who-knows -if –hardy native grasses
         after the first- whenever-steady-good rain pours….)

The cottonwoods, oaks, laurel, willows, buckeyes (with their bare yule pomes
        like a first grader’s crudely fashioned ornaments),

will  hang on  (how?)  in their feedback loops, on this wobbly changing paling
     planet,

       on this sun-pocked sensitive  piece of earth,
that depends on us, caretakers still,

not  subdurers, homewreckers, not what the writer of Genesis dragged into the
     voice of Yahweh saying,
           ...be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the bird of the air, and all the living things that move…

old advice no longer sells so dissolve the conscripted
thicket

between nature and man…..

                  insects are sweeping in from miles around, ips by name,
to bore into the sick

                 pines, the ones with yellow and browning needles, thinning
crowns, dead branches, rotting stumps hunched over

like battered cancer-radiated patients.

A year is not
       a year, a month a month, a week, day, hour, minute…no longer

time with an assured definition, having a blue-ribbon schedule

something once- upon we celebrated and held to like a mother, that one thing
     that
remained the same,

what once was

is becoming:

a skinny abstraction,
a blurring,

husk.

Leonore Wilson's work has been published in such magazines as Quarterly West, Pif, Third Coast, Madison Review, 2RiverReview, Pedestal, Nimble Spirit, and Trivia: Voices of Feminism. She lives on her old family ranch in Northern California where she entertains such loveliness as foxes and rattlesnakes and owls and crows. She has won fellowships to the University of Utah and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. She has taught writing and literature at various colleges and universities in the greater Bay Area.