On a blue day in April I stand on a sunny rise
Above the tumbling waters of Great Brook and look
Into the cellar hole and the crumbling remains of your farmhouse.
The irregular hole in the ground, lined carefully with boulders
You dug from the earth now fills slowly with leaves and branches,
Rusting cans, and beer bottles shedding their labels.
My son finds what looks like your front door step,
Now obscured by the rough branches of a weedy tree;
My wife points out the pale tips of the day lilies
Your own wife planted years ago beside the granite slab.
They reach, tender and green, toward the warm April sun.
Down hill from the cellar hole the ruins of the foundation
Of your barn form a great rangy rectangle.
The stones lie where, over the course of the years,
Earth has pulled them down, bit by bit.
Behind where the barn once stood there once was a pasture.
The sumacs and birches haven’t taken it over completely.
A robin still judges it open enough for his purposes;
He suspends his hunting in the yellow grass for while
To hide in the branches of a stunted maple as we walk by.
Great Brook continues its immutable, ever varying roar.
The sun hangs in the cloudless sky; the air is cool.
I envy the peace of the life I imagine that you once led here.
I envy the simplicity of a life connected to the land
And the rhythms of nature. These fields, such as they were,
This wood, this house, this barn - these were your world.
I long for a life so simply circumscribed.
I long to shut out the world, to let the rim of hills
That surrounds me here become my universe,
As I imagine, standing here in the April sun, it was yours.
But was your life so different from mine, or was it
Like any other human life, with its own worries, sorrows, joys?
I can never know what your world was really like,
Any more than you can comprehend mine.
The peace I feel here on this knoll is illusory.
It is only felt because the lives that were lived here have ended.
Your sorrows, your worries – the early frost, the stillborn calf,
The rotten tooth, the fever that took a child - have been felt
And have passed. They are ended, and fallen away,
Leaving no more trace of the pain they caused you
Than a few broken shingles and a mossy foundation
Can indicate the height and breadth of the house
That once stood where they lie.
The sun drops to the tops of the trees. The shadows lengthen.
My family and I move on, back into the woods to follow the path
That will take us out to the road. We go in companionable silence,
In single file, each of us absorbed in our thoughts.
As Great Brook roars as we walk back to our car and the world that waits.
We leave you behind. We leave the trees to their job
Of slowly taking back as their own what once briefly was yours
Above the tumbling waters of Great Brook,
On a sunny rise, in a blue day in April.
30.4.05
A Heron in the Nest
To continue this bird theme (hmm . . . does this say anything about the blogger?)
Yesterday I took a walk through the woods behind our house, down the path that leads to the meadow. I'm not really sure why it's called a meadow; what's there is under water. Apparently this was a grassy meadow before the beavers chose to block Willow Brook and create a large, oblong pond.
There are moments that must be magical, when one becomes firmly planted in the Now. Everything else seems to drop away as the mind focuses on the one thing. That's what happened yesterday. It was a beautiful late April afternoon. Daffodils and forsythia were in bloom, the grass was greening, yet a cool breeze blew from the north, as if to say that Winter has not completely released its grip. The sky was deep blue, and a caravan of small white clouds drifted from the north, passing in stately procession.
In the woods the trees were still gray, held in winter's torpor, but on the forest floor Canada mayflower was poking through the thick carpet of dead leaves. As I approached the meadow the pines and hemlocks whispered in the wind. I could see the pond through the trees, and saw the water sparkling and rippling.
At one end of the pond stand three or four dead trees, stripped of their bark, remnants of the meadow that once was here. In one of those trees a heron nest - a rough aggregation of sticks and twigs - has sat in the crook of a branch for as long as I can remember. I stepped toward the pond as quietly as I could and got to the shore just in time to see a heron perch on the side of the nest. It stood there motionless for a minute or two; if it saw me it gave no indication. Then in an instant the bird stepped down into the nest and settled itself into the nest so all I could see was its head. I stood to watch it a little longer, not wanting to scare it off the nest again. I wondered what the bird thought of the sounds of traffic that made themselves heard - faintly - over the sounds of wind and water. At the far northern end of the pond stood The Mountain, ancient pile of Kinsman granite, the landmark that means "home" to all of us who live in this area.
I turned from the pond in this magical moment of clean breeze, blue water and golden sun and headed back up the path to our house. A garter snake slithered across the path then stopped. I looked at it; it looked at me. A little later I encountered a red squirrel and it performed the same brief staring match with me. Coming over the rise and into the hollow that stands at the bottom of our hill I found wood frog eggs in a vernal pool - cloudy masses of jelly adhering to submerged branches, each mass holding the promise of hundreds of amphibian lives.
The path turns steep as it approaches our house. By the time I reached the top of the hill the sinus infection that has left me tired and in a funk all week finally caught up with me, and I sat on a flat rock to rest beside my wife's bed of daffodils and hyacinths. As I sat I looked out to the hills that stand to our south. Each rounded peak stood purple in the late afternoon shadows. The hills, the path, the woods, the meadow, and the flat rock upon which I sat and everything else that was illuminated by the golden sun were all bathed in the cool, blessed wind from the northwest. My head was sore and my arms and legs ached, the magic persisted unperturbed, without end.
Yesterday I took a walk through the woods behind our house, down the path that leads to the meadow. I'm not really sure why it's called a meadow; what's there is under water. Apparently this was a grassy meadow before the beavers chose to block Willow Brook and create a large, oblong pond.
There are moments that must be magical, when one becomes firmly planted in the Now. Everything else seems to drop away as the mind focuses on the one thing. That's what happened yesterday. It was a beautiful late April afternoon. Daffodils and forsythia were in bloom, the grass was greening, yet a cool breeze blew from the north, as if to say that Winter has not completely released its grip. The sky was deep blue, and a caravan of small white clouds drifted from the north, passing in stately procession.
In the woods the trees were still gray, held in winter's torpor, but on the forest floor Canada mayflower was poking through the thick carpet of dead leaves. As I approached the meadow the pines and hemlocks whispered in the wind. I could see the pond through the trees, and saw the water sparkling and rippling.
At one end of the pond stand three or four dead trees, stripped of their bark, remnants of the meadow that once was here. In one of those trees a heron nest - a rough aggregation of sticks and twigs - has sat in the crook of a branch for as long as I can remember. I stepped toward the pond as quietly as I could and got to the shore just in time to see a heron perch on the side of the nest. It stood there motionless for a minute or two; if it saw me it gave no indication. Then in an instant the bird stepped down into the nest and settled itself into the nest so all I could see was its head. I stood to watch it a little longer, not wanting to scare it off the nest again. I wondered what the bird thought of the sounds of traffic that made themselves heard - faintly - over the sounds of wind and water. At the far northern end of the pond stood The Mountain, ancient pile of Kinsman granite, the landmark that means "home" to all of us who live in this area.
I turned from the pond in this magical moment of clean breeze, blue water and golden sun and headed back up the path to our house. A garter snake slithered across the path then stopped. I looked at it; it looked at me. A little later I encountered a red squirrel and it performed the same brief staring match with me. Coming over the rise and into the hollow that stands at the bottom of our hill I found wood frog eggs in a vernal pool - cloudy masses of jelly adhering to submerged branches, each mass holding the promise of hundreds of amphibian lives.
The path turns steep as it approaches our house. By the time I reached the top of the hill the sinus infection that has left me tired and in a funk all week finally caught up with me, and I sat on a flat rock to rest beside my wife's bed of daffodils and hyacinths. As I sat I looked out to the hills that stand to our south. Each rounded peak stood purple in the late afternoon shadows. The hills, the path, the woods, the meadow, and the flat rock upon which I sat and everything else that was illuminated by the golden sun were all bathed in the cool, blessed wind from the northwest. My head was sore and my arms and legs ached, the magic persisted unperturbed, without end.
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