He follows his nose deep into the understory, roots
through thickets and windfall. Returns with the stick
he’s chosen—who knows why—from the hundreds of hundreds
in this factory of sticks. He carries it the way a tightrope walker
carries a balance bar. Tail high and plume-like he clenches it,
uphill and down, wherever the trail goes. Clenches it while he lifts
his leg to a tree, while he squats, shits, and back-kicks leaves,
while he stops and listens, head cocked, while he lifts his nose,
nudging the air, nostrils vibrating, while he bursts forth as if from
a starting block to chase a squirrel up a tree. He carries the stick
like a trophy. It is his. Is him. And then, for no apparent reason, mid-
stride he lets it go. It falls as naturally and unpredictably as a branch
from a tree. He goes on, doesn’t change pace, doesn’t look back.
                        

Mothers sometimes find their children
sitting placidly in the garden shoving mulch
into their mouths by the handful.
Down on my knees spreading it like icing
around the yard, breathing the rich, loamy aroma,
I myself am sorely tempted to take a bite.
 
The word itself is tasty—from old English melsc—
mellow, sweet—strawy dung, loose earth, leaves
morphing into middle English molsh—soft, moist.
Organic blend of comfort food and love making,
chocolate in bed, soft moans, lift and kneel,
savory smell rising like yeast, steamy as hot bread.
 
The afterlife of trees—mountains of the felled
and fallen, the cut short and cut down, splintered,
cracked, twisted shadows of themselves, sprigs
of greenery still clinging to the recent arrivals.
Into the maw of colossal machinery, the mountains
sink, transformed in the din to shreds, chips,
 
nuggets, powder spewed like dark rainbows
into new, rising mountains, heat building inside
the core, smoke without fire ghosting the slopes.
Amid the smoke the shovels move in, scoop
the cooling mulch into the row of trucks waiting
to deliver their dense and porous cargo.
 
Such variety: pine bark, cypress, cedar, hardwood
blends; natural or dyed (sacrilege)—brown, red, black—
laid out in beds, islands, aprons, halos on the ground,
where halos protect best. Inside a mulch pile I found
five soft, murky eggs. What bird lays eggs in mulch? None,
but more than one kind of snake is drawn to it like Eden.
 
When the truck pulls up with mulch piled high
on the flatbed, I can’t help myself, I run outside
as if the ice cream man has arrived and shout 
I love mulch! The driver, wiry, weather worn,
doesn’t hear me, or pretends. He rubs his stubble,
nods. Where you want it dumped?