Pines

Pines Twenty-four years ago my father and I and a neighbor's boy heeled these thousand in, hunched the whole ridge— then a swirlwind hardscrabble bald— for two days' dusty planting in a hard spring and moved on: Then back one summer eighteen years later I came carrying a load of sorrow and grew close again to these pines, by then twice my height, And all that season worked among them pruning, cutting, shedding my own lower limbs of grief and climbing steadily toward sun, Then, the next summer, I returned to strengthen more, lying long afternoons alone among these trees, their warblers, their rich liturgical shade. And now I have come back again, married anew, heedful as ever of the turkey's wild return to the woods, of the yarns of black bear seen last month in the county, wildcat's squawl in the hollow, and the thirty miles of view from the knob thickly obscured by the coming woods: Working here I am happy under this green roof that sings in the dark above the dust and waste of its beginning, reminding me of youth, trouble, divorce— all I have shed by now, all that dead wood like low branches— and I rest among piles of pinescrap, dry brier, and brusn I have built at its edges, and watch them brighten again with new growth. -Richard Hague 35 ...