As long as I thought just another scrub sumac I let it be. Half-strangled in vines but still stabbing through to light, it seemed an object lesson. But then the berries I'd never noticed took fire from August, the merest smolder banked by flat, parasitic leaves. Woody whips, the runners, swelled with stolen life and every living limb was coiled round and round. Where I parted the tall grass, twenty years of rotted trunks nested l ike snakes' corpses after the field is burned. So I spent an hour saving a mountain ash I wouldn't waste on sumac. How typical, my prejudice toward beauty, I thought, nipping and unravelling suckers, gently untangling leaf from leaf--though one could do worse than prefer beauty. Now the piled vines are a cat's cradle of quickly withering green. The ash's branches buck and toss in wind-driven rain. The rowanberries glisten their fullest crimson, paling even the maple's Joseph-coat of dying leaves. When the ash leaves pale to yellow and its berries soften, goldfinches will gorge and scatter its seed. © Dale R. Hobson. All rights reserved. Saving the Ash is an older poem. If one were well-versed in theology, it would be possible to see the Celtic Goddess figure in the moutain ash (also known as the American rowan--the tree sacred to Her), and to see her antlered consort, the Forest Lord, in the staghorn sumac. The Judeo-Christian Satan could be seen in the snaky, strangling vine and the redeeming grace of God in the glorious goldfinches. One would, however, be totally wrong--this is about cleaning the yard, my old yard. A specific tree next to the drive. But don't be discouraged--the "Joseph-coat" does refer to the biblical Joseph's "coat of many colors." The graphic is stolen from some arboretum place on the web I can't find my way back to in order to give credit. Oscar Wilde said a writer should obey no law but copyright law, but then he logged a lot of jail time.