Moon Country

Pity the Plumeria Tree
Pity the poor plumeria tree:
no white petals again this year;
and again its green, oblong leaves
fall before their prime, expose
its skeletal frame like a desert fossil.
We hadn't asked all that much
of the plumeria---neither the shade
nor the elegance the others give---
only that it be a privacy screen
between our patio and the passersby.
Perhaps it thinks itself the orphan
we'd adopted, the child with atavistic
traits we could not recognize, the one
whom teachers sent home with notes,
the kid who missed the open goal,
the young man who left for the hills
with The Wanderers---the son
for whom we'd kill the fatted calf
if only he'd come back home to us,
be the new leaf on our plumeria tree.

In his Moon Country poems, Michael E. Murphy spirits the reader off to exotic places like Iguazu Falls, the Bolshoi Theatre, Galleons Lap, the Agasawara archipelago in the western Pacific and back to drier ground in the Cholla Gardens of Joshua Tree Park. On the wings of these and other poetic flights, the reader accompanies Murphy as he comes of age in St. Paul, raises a family and develops an international business law practice in Minneapolis, then returns in retirement to St. Paul-and to California's Coachella Valley to write his life stories. For that's what these Moon Country poems are-stories. The word poem comes from the Greek poiesis, the act of creating or imagining something, like a story. Murphy invites readers to relive his life with him through these little stories, these Moon Country poems.