The Greening Of The Meadow \ XX

Nancy: How does it happen so suddenly?  The meadow a green I’d almost forgotten, all the weary gray-brown only a memory.

The Greening Of The Meadow

Although this may sound like a line

from a ballad,

you may be expecting me to write

the fa la la

and my lord he came a riding oh

This is not a song, but the true

calendar of Straight Bay.

The greening of the meadow

falls after

the tasseling of the alders,

the going out of the ice,

the furring green and red

of the maples.

Watch and soon you will see the trembling

flowers of the shadblow.

Shadblow

by the waters, leaning

waiting in vain for the shad.

These are the things that

make our calendar.

The day by day returning

of the birds,

the warming and yearning and gliding

of the snakes,

frogs singing, by night

and by day.

And we step into the calendar,

with backs bent,

with the spade and the hoe and the seeds

and the greening then

of the rows.

Perhaps then there is a song

of sun and sweat,

of joy and gratitude as the pages turn

and as we

sit on the shore singing quietly

the calendar of Straight Bay.

Alan:  Absence as a presence that defines the space around it.  The poem itself speaking from farther and farther away – still sending its signal over all the distance of the years.

XX

for Nancy

Twenty years ago,

I came here

to stay a month – or a season.

Love held me,

through all the summer droughts

and winter cold.

Today I gaze

past daffodils, forsythia we planted,

heavy with showers, nodding,

to rough low fields

we never could subdue.

Around me,

books and papers of an

untidy existence,

dishes in the sink,

dust on the shelves.

It is not hard to live alone

and have no standards,

still I long for you now,

to help me wonder

where the time goes

when it slips off down the hill.