Poet's Choice

the man came with his chainsaw. "Memories,"

she'd shrug, when I spoke wistfully of it.

She never seemed to miss that tree, although

it was a few more years after she died

before we'd have an avocado in

a salad. Tasting it, I understand

how little pleasure teaches us in life.

Much more honorable is sacrifice.

Campo often writes in rhyme. Here, his fluent unrhymed pentameters, with their plainspoken quality, recall the same measure in Robert Frost's great blank verse poems "The Death of the Hired Man" and "Home Burial." The presence of "even those/ who left us long ago," recalls another predecessor, Thomas Hardy, and another poem of family history, "The Self-Unseeing":

Here is the ancient floor,

Footworn and hollow and thin,

Here was the former door