Classic Poem

Near Alford we are: Low gear
going up; old grey maples pillaring
landscape and sky, another year
winding down in their wild
disheveling tartans â?¦ Nothing
to them of course, fixed here

for ages, how they'll be bare
as fence-rails soon except
clear nights when the stars roost there
or times when the snow's fallen
so softly and un-windswept
they'll have down mufflers to wear;

or how in Spring — or pre-
Spring — harnessed in spiles
and buckets, each old tree
trudges its endless furrows
of sunlight — astronomical miles —
sweating clear maple honey;

or each, all summer long,
wears its own commonplace
cosmos of five-prong
stars casting down shadows
instead of radiance — a grace
to groundlings when the sun's strong

and in mild gloom one can peer
out at such bright, slow cumulus
clouds it's as if the hemisphere
slept and were dreaming them . . . .
The truth is (simply) tremendous
enterprises are afloat here . . . .











By permission of the author.