Late April, late afternoon,
blots of snow and ice bearing
rainbows still cling in the rocks
across the river that swells
wide and swift after the snows
of the heaviest, coldest
winter in years. In the fields
great dark pools of melt and rain
spread out in all the lowest
places and wait for warm days
to number their vanishing.
Longer by far than living
memory are the seasons
of life and labor of men
and women in these meadows
and hills along the river.
Since I first came here: Daigneault,
Spooner, Smith and Fritz Maxey
(that bad man, the worst of them),
Sparapanni and the Soules.
They are gone and no one now
will follow them, their machines
and animals, in these fields
they worked and each in some way
loved. The chain has given out
under the endlessly slow
steady drag of government
and economy, two words
always both fundamental
an absolutely foreign
to this place and the life here.
No cows in the barn, no jar
of barn milk on the table,
the house closed and no one there.
It is unnatural not
to hear the willful human
noise of machinery that
used to seem unnatural
and out of whack. No tractor
to wave to and nobody
to gossip with. By the trees
in the corner near the tracks,
the absence of the baler
abandoned for the winter,

lonely and rusting, now is
lonelier than late April
ever was before. Walking
east from the river, the wind
carries a final crisp edge
of winter to my face, but
the sun on my back is warm.
As I come near the deep pool
in the big ravine, three crows
fly up to the east ahead
of me, their shadows rushing
close along the ground and up
the rise, looking exactly
like three other birds in chase.
As the crows light in the high
branches of a bare white birch,
their shadows follow after
them and suddenly collapse
on the crows and disappear
like the past that vanishes
into each present moment.
Further ahead to the north,
my dog like all other dogs
before him les down and rolls
in the dust of last year’s grass.

Originally published in
Zone 3