Elms attacked have knots
where the sun shouldn't be,
powerlines run through branch hearts,
whole cores crackling and absorbing
half-rotted metals of totally rotted men,
rust tangled into the rust-colored leaves
in a barricade tide, the fabric's edge
of planetary wings, bittersweet mortar of
space between space, tar-eaten molecules,
tan shoulders severed on the rim of a hat,
rivulets in sand whose paths matter like fire.