1. Starksboro

Early morning. I bathe and step
out onto the high porch to dry
off, naked in the sun. It is
another summer, one more year
in another place. I listen.
While the wind talks to the sky, trees
talk to the wind, and the birds all
are speaking to each other,
collectively and by kind, except
for a lone rose breasted grosbeak
who says nothing at all. His chest
burns like a wound in the sunlight.
A pair of indigo buntings
flit through a wide arc and fly off.
They come back, fly away again
and return at last to stay.
Whenever His Iridescence moves,
she follows, not to where he’s flown,
but to the branch he just has left.
I bring out my notebook and write,
this on-going story, part fact
part invention. Far to the west
a long file of clouds has settled
on the lake like a procession
of blind sheep slowly travelling
north and home. A neighbor’s dog, left
alone up here for the week, snaps
a branch and walks from the brambles
. He comes up the path to my door
and sits with a sudden, hollow
sound of resignation. I look
towards Burlington under a cloud.
Thousands of other worlds down there.
The nets of illusion are wound
infinite and tight: desire, dreams
and death. At noon, when the forest
assessors arrive up the hill,
I notice I’ve been wondering
for hours: What do we mean by “home”?

2. The Beaver

Strange that among this whole army
that straggles up here day after
day so resolutely to find
the beaver pond back in the woods,
not one person has yet returned
having seen the beaver himself,
either now or before I came.
But evenings when I walk out for
the hour in between the long day
and the quick night and climb into
his world, there I find him, swimming
calmly, twisting through the smooth dark
water of his pool, sleek and brown
as his own sodden pelt of earth.

Obeying a childish impulse,
I step out of my overalls
and stand there naked before him
as if to show I am his plain
brother and unarmed. The beaver
doesn’t notice. A single cloud
presses like a bandage against
the dying sun. Light rides the wind,
seeps to the valley below us
and ignites the roofs of silos
that glow back, staunch dumb sentinels
guarding labor against the night.

The beaver stumbles from the pool
up the bank to his work. He trods
on branches, strips them clean, gulps down
leaves, grinds the wrist of a slender
popple till it falls like a hand
waving its last good-bye. Clenching
hard he drags it to the water.
He looks about him, finds the place
and floats it there. Deliberate,
always conscious, he fortifies
his lodge, oblivious of me.

The beaver works. I watch, and then,
sudenly, I remember words
sent to me in a letter from
a friend, written at one desk, read
at another: “Glad to hear you

so cheerful, sane and full of works.”
Well, sane and working anyway.
The beaver knows better. He can’t
confuse happiness with being
sane as I did till taught by him.

Beaver, you are all sanity.
Yours is the darkness and ripe flesh
of the fruit of endless labor.
You don’t grin. You’re not gay. You don’t
see me, but you work like the wind
struck by the left wing of order
into the right wing of chaos.

A half mile below us, twenty
miles to the north, they are sitting
shoulder to shoulder, in the bars
and at plastic tables, singly,
in offices and libraries,
plotting seductions, trials, lost
revolutions and their careers.
Beaver, master, does no passion
feed you? Where here, sire, is your mate?

Grieving for all of us, I watch,
in sanity, the beaver hack
glory branches in the mud.
At last he starts, lifts up his head
and sees me. He cracks his broad strong
tail on the surface of his pool.
He slips through the shattered water,
disappears in the dark. I walk down
one hill, up another, and go home.

Originally published in
The Americn Poetry Review