Dedicated to Ernestine Taggard
Gilfeather: a name and a place and a part of Vermont.
All elegy and hope-hard to say how.
Not a family home.
It’s old, house built the year of Shays’ rebellion.
When we go to Gilfeather we feel
Oldness and newness, the quick, the dead and the future.
Question: What’s wanted then?
Answer: A fire and a thaw.
March and now Vermont as grey as a bone,
Her granite showing, powder blue her hills
Patched with dead snow, the river near Jamaica
Raging. Nothing but mud and weather.
(Vermont will still be here in a hundred years.)
On this raw frame, O March in mimic turn,
With little thaw and tiny pricking green,
(Through April and soft May and lofty early
Half-figured June, the month to haunt the sad),
Prepare the next: the nodding deer and the larches.
Basic this contour, clutter swept to Champlain.
Vermont will still be here in a hundred years.
Ruin and poverty younger than lichenstone,
Burnt to an ash. I see Vermont
Old, wild and new. Grass thick as now,
The upland meadows rimmed with wet, the woods
Quiet to the ground. A place for the young to grow.
Wildness coming up in a soft tide to caress
The boys and girls. Vermont will keep with its weather.
Basic this contour, clutter swept to Champlain.
We can turn them loose up there some day and forget them.
Better than grandma’s apron or homespun knee.
I can see them dim and ephemeral, the children climbing
Put arms around a tree, cheek on rough bark resting.
Basic this contour. Clutter swept to Champlain,
Drowned in defile as deep as glacier-cut,
The way you blow off ashes from your coat.
What’s left? The nodding deer and the larches.
The country children and the city children.
The sweet and quiet land.
What’s wanted then? A fire and a thaw.
Ruin and poverty younger than lichenstone,
Burnt to an ash. I see Vermont
Old, wild and new. Grass thick as now,
The upland meadows rimmed with wet, the woods
Quiet to the ground. A place for the young to grow.
Wildness coming up in a soft tide to caress
The boys and girls. Vermont will keep with its weather.
Basic this contour, clutter swept to Champlain.
We can turn them loose up there some day and forget them.
Better than grandma’s apron or homespun knee.
I can see them dim and ephemeral, the children climbing
Put arms around a tree, cheek on rough bark resting.
Basic this contour. Clutter swept to Champlain,
Drowned in defile as deep as glacier-cut,
The way you blow off ashes from your coat.
What’s left? The nodding deer and the larches.
The country children and the city children.
The sweet and quiet land.
What’s wanted then? A fire and a thaw.
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