As I excavate their basement studios of loam, I love
How the worms completely ignore their new landlord 

While the neighboring divas of weeping willows
Don’t lose their lovey leaves’ hairdos worrying if

I’ll ruin their high-rise view of dawn slowly raking over 
Moose pond—so owning, finally, my modest lot 

where skunks squat, non-stop, I concede my provisional rule 
over this fiefdom of forest and creatures. Still, nights, 

as portly porcupines loiter in my gravel drive (as though
waiting to slash my tires), the surveyor of ego desires 

to pin, ribbon, and fence in every square inch
of my two-acre deed. Yet before I can evict one lease-less, 

free-loading, meathead of a weasel from beneath
The garden shed, the chirping chickadees proclaim

All the “no-rent” nests the old beech and maples abide 
Even though, each dawn, the birds turn the bowery of boughs 

Into a raucous nursery. And now, factoring all the free 
youth hostels of golden rod alongside endless B and B’s 

Of pine tree canopies welcoming the peripatetic insects, 
My generosity greens into a vow to be more forgiving 

Of spring’s famished bears dumpster diving my compost piles 
After the first winter where I’ll, now, tolerate all the vassals

Of voles and mice storming my castle for breadcrumbs….
For now, though, as the horizon blushes with dusk, time 

To open that food pantry of compost pile two nights a week 
For raccoons and squirrels whose native lands I continue to seize.

After that, I’ll cut the property line’s rusted barbed wire
So deer and moose have clear access to the one plot

of unfenced kale I’ll now tithe in belated reparation.
And look, now, at the feeding doe and fawn, each dusk,

drawing a little closer to me on the porch and spawning 
such warmth as she trusts me to be within ten yards of her 

fawn, that I feel this couldn’t be my home without these lovely creatures 
within my property line’s rusted pins and red, faded-to pink-ribbons.