Two of them, sixty feet high, with trunks as big around
 as fifty-gallon barrels, lean at a corner of the house,
 sprinkling their tiny green bur-like flowers
 over the deck and during windy thundershowers
 dropping their sprigs of leaves, delicate as ferns.
 Just weeks ago they hummed with thousands of bees,
 a sound like a huge refrigerator left in the sun.
  
 When they were young they had fierce black
 two-inch thorns, but they have since grown old
 along with us and have tired of defending themselves.
 Just now a nuthatch flits back and forth to the feeder,
 hiding sunflower seeds in the bald, wrinkled bark, 
 and somehow a clump of grass has taken root 
 in a sap-damp crotch six feet above the ground.
  
 Autumn is still a whole summer away, but it will come,
 and with it great showers of copper locust leaves
 like pennies, but oval-shaped, more like those pennies
 a man at a carnival many years ago rolled through
 a little machine on the tailgate of his truck
 that pressed the Lord’s Prayer into them. Each of us
 got only one, but these trees give us many.