A Verb Agreement

After a windstorm, the first man aloft in our broad silky-oak tree was Andrew Lansdown the poet, bearded and supple, nimbly disinvolving wrecked branches up where I couldn’t clamber. He asked for our chainsaw, but I couldn’t let him hazard an iamb or a dactyl, nor far worse his perched body of value and verses; showering rubies were an image to terrify even about an imagist so spry. So, above my scattered choppings, he hawked with a handsaw west-and-southerly and went home to Susan with our thanks, God-spared from caesuras or endstoppings. The tree has twice since become a Scala of ginger balconies, a palladium as it does every October. Birds with skin heads like the thumb on a black hand interrogate its bloom with dulcet commentary till it’s sober but, bat-nipped gold or greening out blue, it glories like the kingdom within Andrew.