I’m planting trees today.
Cherry trees in front,
Peter on the street,
Paul in the middle,
with Mary closest in toward the house,
all on the far side of our gravel drive.

On the same southern side,
along my neighbor’s new above the eyebrows 8-foot fence,
backside facing me,
which is fine,
more backdrop character for vines and ivy,
preferably less poisonous,
I also plant three larger fruit trees,
Dillen first,
then Spencer,
then Daquan,
after my three sons
in that original adoption-planting order.

Then, by the front porch
on northern side,
an apple tree
named Marvin after Gaye,
my first love before I knew what mine felt right like.

Three thornless blackberries
planted in the back,
Matthew first, of course,
with shared Beatitudes,
then Mark, progenitor of gospel vocation stories,
then Luke the ecotherapeutic Medicine Bush,
luxuriously black berryed, Agape.

All this vast recently adopted extending family
to greet and nourish my multiculturally mutually adopted,
and sometimes quite dysfunctionally malnourished,
human fractured family,
but rarely allowed to go to bed angry or frightened,
at least by each other.

While planting I go in and through our home
with my muddy gardening shoes,
remembering my mother’s exasperated voice,
Who tracked all this mud through my kitchen?!
and my standard response,
The mud-tracker prefers to remain anonymous.

I’ll just bet he does,
she responds,
as I reach for broom and dustpan.

Then later,
Why, of all things, would you choose to track through all this muddy gay identity?
I was really planning on birthing a Saint!
and my response, of course,
The filthy queer prefers to remain anonymous.

I just hope he does,
I can hear her thinking
as I plant Peter, then Paul,
then Mary, the cherries.

About that same time,
while sorting through syncretic interdependence of regenerative economics as power-politics,
my mother wondering why I would choose to head toward Hell
as an unredeemed Taoist,
and my response
The evilish Taoist-Christian hybrid
prefers to remain both atheistically anonymous
and power-theistically full of sacred diastatic abundance.
In other words,
polypathically and multiculturally empty,
and yet co-redeeming as co-loving interdependent fertility does,
not just pinefully and whinefully intends.

About this time I am singing
my final adoption by baptism rite with Marvin Gaye,
Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine”
dedicated to all those transubstantiating syncretic polyculturists
inside, as ecopolitically outside,
even if preferring sacred organic co-rootedness
to secularly remaining as anonymous as a wordless tree.