Scarred by a long gone buck’s rubbing,

shoved westward by his develveting grind,

the aspen had always leaned, and I had thought

many times I should stake it up, straighten it out,

but I never did, then last week’s several heavy

feet of snow became rain, and under that weight it split

at the buck’s scar and bent to the ground,

and I was bereft. But in my regret I hauled

through the snow a hundred feet of ropes,

a come-along, a pair of steel pintel hooks,

and a five-gallon bucket of hopeful arborist’s

paraphernalia. I tied it off to a stouter tree,

winched it upright again, braced it with a two-by-four

plank notched and swaddled at the notched end

in innertube ribbons, then guyed it off to the fir

that was the engine of its reascension.

Afterward I plastered black tar around its wound,

wound a bandage of grafting tape over the tar,

and covered the tape in a green vinyl sleeve

against the winter yet to come. And every day

in order to offer such apologies as I can

I visit it. Sometimes, like the other day, I sit with it,

put an arm around it, and describe the motions

of its leaves in spring and summer,

and especially in its glorious fall:

how its gold shimmers, and sometimes how

a leaf will loose itself and fly the ten yards

to the porch of my shack and settle on a chair,