issue 25 > poetry > kane

1.
"Don't place your picnic table
under a pecan tree," goes the old
Cajun saying. Must be an Anglo
who planted this one next to my house
a hundred years ago. Pecan wood's
brittle, and when a hard rain soaks
limbs heavy with green pecans,
you never know when one will crack,
crash down on something-
last year my paid-for car,
totaled right in my driveway,
garlanded with boughs of greenery
like a float on Mardi Gras Day.

2.
At daybreak after Hurricane Rita,
my yard looked like Birnam Wood
advancing: limbs and branches down
everywhere, a solid mass of green.
That's when the neighbors told me
that the lot across the street
used to have a clapboard house like mine,
crushed by a pecan tree.

3.
Living with a pecan tree means
living with the ping, ping
of ripe pecans on corrugated tin,
the garage roof under continual shelling
when they're in season;
and the doorbell ringing,
hauling you out of a late-day nap
to some tattered old man with a grocery sack
wanting to pick your pecans.

4.
Next time the house sells,
the buyer might have to chop the tree down
to get insurance on it-
that's what happened up the street.
There are women who will chop their breasts off
because they might get cancer,
and a woman who makes pro-and-con lists
about a deceitful lover
with a sweet tooth for pecan pralines.

5.
Everything's coming into leaf this week
except the old pecan trees:
the Japanese magnolias raining down pink,
a light purple fuzz on the redbuds.
But the old pecans won't leaf
until the freeze danger's finally over,
and the local farmers trust them
because they have grown beyond hope.






Also by Julie Kane:

Lady's Slippers