Our favorite tea party

Like bullet blasting from a sawed-off shot gun
he explodes into the yard,
barking and disintegrating every neatly-laid leaf.
The tea set we'd carefully arranged for the ladies
and the recently planted buckets of petunias,
once nestled between spring tulips under the redbud,
are now splattered over the patio
with hand-painted shards of porcelain the fragmented
bones of the guest of honor, the oolong tea from China.

The squirrel, meanwhile, twitches her tail in the oak tree
before flicking into her bolthole, cheeks stuffed with
recently recovered proto-tree.
I offer my cousin, visiting from Seattle, a dry-cleaning;
she spots off her formerly white shirt with a dirt-streaked napkin
and pats him on the head, consoling him for the lost catch.