Old man, what were you thinking of,
Walking through your woods
In the halflight of that snowy day?
Pausing here and there to crane up at the
Great trunks of elm, your voice indistinctly
Rising and falling in the whitened air,
It's plain you never intended that I hear.
Yet ever since I've wondered what prompted
Those passionate mutterings into the wind
2
Were you that day zealously planning
To turn those trees into just so much barn timber
Or board feet at the mill?
Maybe you were simply despairing of the world
For moving further each year from that
Tough heartwood you'd sweated over as a boy.
Or is it possible you were celebrating those old elms
For standing tall against the march of all those years,
Much as I do these oaks and hickories I walk under here
3
Then I watched you from the standoff
Province of my teen-age world,
From where my fading boot tracks
Would never intersect your own.
There by the fringing pond reeds and
Frozen muskrat domes
I saw you stride into a Sunday blizzard's eye,
Spooling words to what you thought were only trees,
Beneath that shearing winter sky, a short forty years ago.