My cousins & I made a new home for the farm dog

between two grey toes of one of the Cypresses.

If you know them, they are inauspicious:

they have done their job as uncomplaining windbreaks

for decades, even approaching centuries

in the case of the big colonial cattle holdings.

They are indentured to the full-scale mollification

of the Southern ocean on the basalt plains.

In their native Monterey, they tend the other way,

risking life and limb for a random cliff

on the Pacific coast. For wont of an ocean vista

on retirement, they exist in a state of relict parlousness.

As working trees out near the farm’s boundaries,

conversely, they get few visitors: a lone cow,

lost on a very hot day; a cast-iron bath with brass feet

always too confused to be a water trough.

A full stand of Cypresses makes its own

acid rain of mulch; an understorey of prone brown

needles, like the landscape after Mt St. Helen’s,

or large-scale cropping, or the Tunguska Event.

We had to dig through broad deposits of that stuff

first, and we had no need of implements,

small hands being enough to rub away the resin

and the rain, and its weak attempt at sediment.

After all pawing out a kind of triangle barrow

in the actual soil, I think we commented how

dark it was down there: true dark, like

an isolation cell, or your first harrowing go

at blind man’s bluff. When they say Cypresses

are nice, and evergreen, this is a massive misnomer:

in domesticated form, their foliage only exists

to shake down the sun if it tries to evade

a real no-man’s-land of overlain boughs.

We rested the straightest sticks we could find

to make a roof for the tomb, then, in semi-

resignation already, floated funeral roses

of paddock grass on top: a chance attempt

at warming thatch. The poor dog rejected the whole

proposition outright, tumbling most of the roof

structure down upon her frantic back

during a scurried, instantaneous scramble out.

Here was the shortest-lived of many efforts

to make something habitable out of monument.

It was a huge, overwashing relief for us,

walking out again from under the Cypresses’ function:

its powerful message to the barbarian enemies

of mixed-use farmland, of animal husbandry in general.

Instead, back to open plains: a freezing, uproarious wind,

and an almost oneiric morning sun, rebuffed,

but half-heartedly, by sets of pillowy palms.