Addison tells of spending his summer
clearing the farm his family has owned
since the revolutionary war,
acres and acres of overgrown fields—
pastures and hayfields, hedgerows, timberlands—
a big enterprise for an ex–farm boy
turned pastor in a flowing cassock
not handy for plowing. I’ve seen him lift
the bread and wine in pale hands above
the bowing heads of his parishioners.
Now as he celebrates the Eucharist,
I see the chalice turn into an ax,
the handle darkened with his father’s sweat,
and before that, his grandfather’s, on down
the generations until the sad phrase
delivered in the garden comes to mind:
sweat of your brow, which now is Addison’s,
clearing the land so that we see the light
as it first shone on Adam, pruning turned
into a kind of hands-on ministry.
What did he see once the hedgerows were cleared?
The skies opening, divine light beaming down
on distant vistas of a promised land?
Salvation for God’s sweating minister?
No, he saw only what was there to see—
rolling green hills such as a child might draw,
cars moving on a distant road like beads
on an abacus, a neighbor hanging wash:
the earth released and grown so luminous
that he was saved simply by seeing it.