PRINCEMERE POETRY PRIZE

North of Putney

The roads not to be trusted
after heavy rain,
half a lane
gone here and there, collapsed around their rusted
culverts, I follow Frost's advice and take to the woods. The trail is clear
enough to start; I do not interfere
with fate, but grant that I was meant
to rise into a field and follow down
the soggy verge. The clover is content
underfoot, and asters keep us company.
Nearby, sagging twists of brown
barbed wire define a weedy
plot, flags commending Revolutionary graves. Two tall
stones say a set of parents knew old age; their eldest saw nineteen.
Their other six are small, blank stones weathered black, sunk in green—
still markers, but memorials no more. And no one now can glean
the words the stones have dropped or tell how a single winter took them all,
or hard birth, one by one, or playing by the brook or in the marsh alone.
         Thoreau
says I should have gone up garret at least twenty years ago
but having left my hillside contemplation, I am buying cheese behind a wall
of blooming hostas in a yellow hut with grapevines curtaining the door,
         self-serve, scraping pennies from a bowl to make the change exact,
and I will go
further on, just to see,
along this dirt track
and the white Maremma sheepdog will follow me,
flies clustering his orange vest, and I will tell him
that he is good,
even though he should
probably be barking on the ridge with the flock in case of predators.
         His whim
and mine are kin, like the wooly clouds and those that mimic
         brushings from his fur;
and the goldenrod thick with Joe Pye weed where
         cultivated things once were;
and the renegade streams cutting temporary beds across the public ways.
If I knew his name, I would write it here.
Such would be light labor, no small joy.
Conferring passing honor on the citizens of our haphazard days,
without the tools to shear
in slate the ultimate,
we still might gesture toward posterity,
remember as in prayer. The ancients' stories set
in stars a smaller dog, blazing at Orion's heels; two stars and no name,
         not really.
A toast, then, to a wandering stranger drinking from a ditch; this, my envoi.