Eclipse \ A Kind Of Immortality

Alan: Remembered scenes come back as gifts, turned in the mind until ready to be passed on.  This is from the late years of my family’s many decades of summers spent on Squam Lake, New Hampshire.

Eclipse

                         for Mims at 90

The day after Bob

slugged the coast

breaking trees

from Portland to the border

I drove Rte 25 –

WestbrookGorhamCornishStandish

KezarFallsPorter –

the huge moon

in a washed-clean sky

over my shoulder

like being in a folk song,

the shadows rich and suggestive,

even the broken branches of the pines

along the roadside

rich and suggestive,

until somewhere beside the river

the night darkened

bit by bit, becoming at last

only the night,

and I arrived at camp

to find Doug and Betty and Bud

sitting on the deck

talking quietly

watching a perfect round patch

of old yellowed skin

high above the cove.

We waited, content

in each other’s company,

until at last

the shadow pulled away

leaving the moon

again the moon,

pure and simple as longing,

preening in the

dancing waters

below.

Nothing else happened.

Bud paddled home;

we all went to bed.

I have held that moon all these years

until it is smooth and rounded as beach glass,

and because 9 and 0

are such beautiful round numerals

I give it to you now:

that night

those people

this moon.

Nancy: Columbine, roses, lilac and peony: push through the thickets to the memories, the old gardens, the women who tended them.  Mary and Nancy, Sarah and Jane live on, live in the breeze.

A Kind Of Immortality

farms fail

fire takes the houses

frost takes the cellar holes

fences fall

roads fill

fields go to alders

alders to maple

maple to spruce

graves subside

families disperse

to wanderlust

gold dust

fruitless love

but here

in a kind of immortality

white columbine

from the scree of the cellar holes

from the veins of the ledge

white columbine

on a blue cloth

on a black stove

ours to hold

ours to pass on

now our immortality

when we are gone