in memory of George MacArthur
I stared at a lone white cedar this morning, astonished,
so few of that height and girth left standing from when
they were hewn by hand for railroad ties by loggers.
I had no choice but to think of beloved George,
a boyhood hero, who cut and shaped those sleepers,
as ties were called. Then machines showed up. Still George
hung tight to his stories and his sleeper axe. Thank God.
My stronger bonds, I’m sometimes half persuaded,
are with the vanished. I’d wandered west today
to Old County Road, which the town long since abandoned.
Then I gradually made my way to east and back toward home
until, as people say, I got stopped in my tracks
by that self-contained tree – stopped stunned; stopped dead.
George is one of the many dead, whose ranks
I’m doubtless approaching at 80. When I was a kid,
my view of the world was so affected by him
I dreamed myself among George’s descendants. Absurd,
yes, but there’s rough truth there. I’m scarcely that boy
who was loth to be anything else, but George’s voice
and the things it expressed still run as deeply in me
as in those boundless, unknowing yesterdays.
I see I’ve strayed, as older people do.
I’ve drifted into the realm of ghost and gloaming
when I’d meant to focus on one magnificent tree,
which caught my eye on one bravura morning,
the sky’s hue something beyond identification,
the freshets chiming, spring being welcomed by birds,
the scent all over of mud and moldering leaf.
I beheld that cedar for the very first time, it seemed,
and likewise heard some of George’s long-ago words.
All that aliveness – so flagrant it challenged belief.