Mornings at My Rear Window

There’s a mulberry tree out there.

Not the limb-sprawling giant

cloistered in building-wall backyard

that greeted me my first days here.

The absentee owner decreed its destruction,

and I had to witness its birdie heaven tumble.

An avian fantasy world gone,

I stared out at blank factory walls,

saw no fiery red cardinals lurking,

no turquoise blue jays squabbling,

nor chirping yellow finches;

I saw no parrots or cockatiels

happy to have escaped their hippie prisons,

Free at last, great God almighty,

from those well-meaning stoners

who left the windows open,

or who insisted on a disproportionate quantity

of marijuana seeds

in the feed dishes…

Or who brought them to the park,

never considering the lure of the skies.

I heard no more song,

witnessed no more noisy rejoicing over juicy berries,

because the berries were gone.

When they hung dense and bursting with syrup,

the berries were white, not purple,

on a tree that got an hour of reflected sunlight every day,

and a brush of real rays across its fluttering tops.

And then, like spectral glow worms,

they too were gone.

The tree,

gone,

took up a black space in my vision,

ghost-like.

But life endures.

Three years later a sprout appeared,

poking from a weathered stump.

A decade more, a hardy sapling

on a rooted wooden platform,

the tomb of its mother.

Ten more summers and the tree is back,

having no memory of past losses

or the soft feathers of famous birds.

And new generations alight on the mulberry tree

and dot its branches with fresh bird life...

not as colorful now,

since the neighborhood is far more practical

than way back then.

The birds are mostly brown and beige.

Keeping a colorful bird is too whimsical.

People have designer dogs now

…and aging hippies to walk them.