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Not the best time to be trimming the junipers,
my wife reminds me,
it being one week past the middle of August,

but I fear that if I give the bushes another hour
they’ll overcome us
all, and though I love the lovely scent of cedar

I prefer not to be smothered by it—and, too,
there is something
to be said for doing something by the sweat

of one’s brow, grandmother on my father’s side
awash in sweat as she
walked the clothesline decapitating chickens,

my father wringing sweat from a square of blue
cotton as inch by inch
he dug a tunnel under our lopsided house

to accommodate a floor furnace no less than
to defuse a peckish wife.
Not far to the north, at a fountain in Eden