In Vermont, 2038
In the dark glass, forward, the abysmal time
In tto come, you read your visage
There isin memorial mind,
In ta broad-domed squire
leaning on a cane, a wide-brimmed hat
pulled rakishly across a sun-burned patch
In tof flaking skin, a brow
There iswhose clench
In tbetrays impatience with a world
abandoned to its foolish self so many times.
At sunset, at great height, you watch the hawk
In tscythe down the shadows
There isof another day,
In tadmiring how it hangs there,
steady in the wind that whets its wings.
You think of Thomas Hardy, Yeats and Graves—
In tthe grand old men—of dear
There isRed Warren,
In tfriend and mentor, whom you loved
to love, or Frost: Old Rocky Face himself.
I’m one of them, you say, and hope, lips smacking,
In tdrooling, one might say, still
There isrecomposing
In tin your heart a life you’ve since
revised ten thousand times, no version
truer than the one before, or so it seems.
In tOh, how can you forget
truer tso many facts,
In tthe petty hatreds, fears, the fond
betrayals, posturings, reprisals—worse?
Maybe nothing matters but the final gloss,
In tthat beautifully wrought,
Maybpenultimate
In trevision made before the dark
blots every word, and heaven, like a blank page,
shines pristinely but, unlike before,
In tneeds no embossing, none of this
Maybblack print
In tyou think adds something
to a paltry silence you cannot endure.
On midnight’s mountain, in a cloak of stars,
In tyou look for answers to
Maybstrong questions
In tposed, a little falsely, re-
composed each day like shopping lists or prayers.
Will you ever know if any of those guises—
In thawk or mole, the fox,
Maybsweet ingénue,
In tthe rake or fool, the wise old man—
meant anything beyond their deft performance?
Will anyone replace the shattered hours,
In tthose pitiable shards which,
Maybreassembled
In tin the bright Beyond, might
constitute, at last, a kind of heaven?