Here I am, again, sitting outside, only,
Its night, and it’s dark. About a week ago,
over my objections, the property managers
of this mining town site and its two thousand houses
or so, scalped my front yard palm tree.
They had tried twice before, a few months back,
but serendipity had intervened. A breakdown
and stormy weather had stopped the deed.

One day last week, though, this same man,
an older man, knocked on the door, unexpectedly.
I knew the moment I saw his company truck
what was going to happen. I almost
had him talked out of it, I mentioned the birds,
insects and the few bats who housed
under the thick, dead-hanging fronds. Certainly,
my cats appreciated the diversion of escapable prey.
He almost acquiesced, then I saw his face change.
He was thinking of the trouble he might get into
if my palm wasn’t sheared. I persisted. Asked
if anyone else had expressed concern and appreciation
for the habitat their palms contained. Apparently not.

So I hid in the house, couldn’t watch, slanted the blinds
to blind my sight. But, before I did, I saw the first fronds
start to fall with heavy thumps. Green fronds. They
had hired a company out of Tucson, professionals,
with a crane lift. I heard the metallic gas-whine
of the chain saw lopping off limbs. It took about
half an hour. This thirty-foot beauty with its five-foot base
had doubled its size in the twelve years we’ve lived
in this copper-based community, mirroring our children.

It’s chilly, tonight. The skies, clear, the moon, full,
while the stars are queuing into time’s night sky.
The mulberry tree over the picnic table
has lost many leaves to Fall’s appetite for life,
and the rope light I strung in the tree is on.
The streetlight’s glare, long thwarted by the palm,
shines up the side yard, stretching its metallic shadow
into the back with a phosphorescent ambiance,
as I listen to far-off dogs barking, and cars
passing on the road above.

Suddenly, my eye is caught by a fogginess of dark,
a miasma of black, about twenty-five feet from me,
just near the bottom of the pomegranate tree
that butts the fence separating the rented houses.
It’s at the very end of my railroad-tie tiered garden.
I blink. It blinks back without movement. I study
its form. Maybe three feet high, two wide, edges
undefined and flocked black. I look away, then back,
it seems to become more substantial in inkiness.

I check around the backyard from my tabletop seat.
I notice several more shapes of pooled darkness.
None are overly large, just collecting in
innocuous spots, like slumped and clumped
shadows, commiserating and consorting
while hiding from sentient eyes. One of my cats,
a black one, enters the garden form's depths, and
disappears. I wait, nothing happens. I observe
this concentration of ebony with new interest.
And, now, I think, maybe it’s a doorway,
an ethereal gateway to … where?

I muse on perilous, unknown pathways, think of
stygian blackness without light, taste a thickness
of sullied caution. I can’t take my eyes
from the non-sight, it seems to send out tendrils
of distress, weeping along the foot of the garden wall.
I glance quickly at the other pools of deep dark,
they throb and pulsate with an inner anxiety
that bothers my senses. I hear a sound, a tiny
throttling gurgle, and turn back to the largest entity.
It blinks. I don’t. Because, I’m wondering
where the cat is, why it won’t come out
so I can see it, and what’s going to occur next..

A wind starts the leaves rustling above me,
scratching at my nerves. A car passing
vibrates a rock off the cliff face, sending it
tumbling down with a small crash, making me jump.
Once more, I study the fugue-form with ambivalence.
I hear the few remaining, spiked palm fronds
murmur with dismayed chatterings. And,
there are answering whispers, from my backyard.

The pools of dark send out soft sighs of longing,
implode with collapsed hopes, coalescing into
indeterminate essences that have lost their abode.
A home once lushly inviting under its darkened umbrella.
Cheerful with bird twitterings and singings, breedings
and nestlings, its insects; comfortably cuddled
with bats in dark-soft entwining; listening to star-song
and night breezes croon with sweet travelings, tickling
their fringes. Mother palm calls again, and falters.
My pools of dark begin to dwindle in disappointment.
I am angered at the thought of their undeserved exile,
mourn their forever displacement. So I welcome them
to my backyard, and into my life, with open arms.

And, now, the cat walks out.

Erin Elizabeth Kelly-Moen
© Copyright 11/26/04