On a Blue Day in April

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.