My good dog, Howard, turned from our path
and led me down into a hospice for trees,
a shadowy place that smelled of mushrooms.

A few trunks had been covered by leaves
but for an elbow or knee, though most were waiting, 
haphazardly tossed here and there

or clumsily stacked, each of them naked
or sparsely draped with coverlets of bark
that looked to be laundered again and again.

Among them leaned an old carbuncled mulberry,
brown as a mummy queen, most of her branches
down, though two with their shoulders broken

swung tremulous and useless at her sides.
Among her roots was a hole that looked as if
it had once made quite a welcome, the bark

pulled up and away, and her hollowed body
had fallen flirtatiously into the arms of an elm,
a slightly younger tree that stood behind her,

and that elm, too, was leaning on another.
It was this hole that my dog had discovered,
and he pawed and pawed at its doormat of leaves,

asking and asking for permission to enter.
Though the opening was dark it wad faintly lit
from somewhere above, as if there were still

a little intelligence burning at the top of that
moldy despair. It was hard to pull Howard away
from that grove where all those trees had gone

to languish, to coax him back from the ancient
mulberry queen who would soon lie lifeless, naked
and bald with the others. So difficult for him,

softhearted dog that he is, to be drawn back
out onto the sunny, grassy path we were to follow
home, and at times he glanced back to that

sorrowful, shadowy place, then up at me as if
to say he was planning to go there again, and soon,
but would undertake that visit on his own.