The Catalpa

The catalpa’s white week is ending there in its corner of my yard. It has its arms full of its own flowering now, but the least air spills off a petal and a breeze lets fall whole coronations. There is not much more of what this is. Is every gladness quick? That tree’s a nuisance, really. Long before the summer’s out, its beans, long as a stick, will start to shed. And every year one limb cracks without falling off and hangs there dead till I get up and risk my neck to trim what it knows how to lose but not to shed. I keep it only for this one white pass. The end of June’s its garden; July, its Fall; all else, the world remembering what it was in the seven days of its visible miracle. What should I keep if averages were all?