(Thanksgiving Day, 1995)

Inarticulate now as he who disappeared
under the iron back of his tractor. 
Hauling logs on a steep Vermont slope, 
he rolled under the hard mechanism 
of his life’s work and lay pinned 
by the wheel. I’m making it up 
as I go—no neighbor to relay the details— 
and without them he’s leaving the earth 
too soon: firefighters have already levered 
the tons of steel from his chest, the ambulance 
has already plucked him from November 
leaves and mud, cars have carried mourners 
to his widow’s home beneath the hundred-year cottonwoods, 
the adze-planed edges of the closed casket 
have been prepared, and the realtor 
come with his hammer and sign.

There has been no time  
to fit myself into the proceedings, I who knew him 
passably enough to know the depth of our differences 
and still to admire the burly, barrel-chested farmer 
who brush-hogged my fields and rehearsed the history 
of this hilltop. To stand with him and survey 
the acres before he mowed them was to prepare 
each time for his death. To stand, spit, and talk 
across the distances of our chosen lives— 
the farmer and the teacher—to hear 
in our exchanges the cringing clichés 
of two men lost to each other—to hear 
yet more than this, some tentative figure 
groping along the stonewall of two men’s 
mental properties and arriving finally at the gap 
where the old carriage road once thrived

with farmers, teachers, and all the odd  
figures of the community, and take it back 
to the 1940s when Paul Carriere farmed alone 
on this hillside, fashioned a rope-tow 
during mud season to skim his milk jugs 
down to the village. And back further 
to the first plot owners of the 1840s 
who planted cottonwoods, raised the house, 
trees and house growing together, the house 
doubling, doubling again as generations 
of farmers milked, hayed, froze, and endured.

Until Paul bought the farm in ’45,  
farmed, froze, fell, and rose up again, time 
after time, herd after herd, until time passed him by 
for good at the swishing tail-end of the century, 
and he joined the farming legions going under. 
Then rose again and turned his hand to even smaller-
scale miracles of survival, carpentry, logging, 
fieldwork, and talking, delivering our firewood, 
hammering our homes, rehearsing, reharrowing 
the local hilltop history . . . until this Thanksgiving 
when the iron machine reared up and crushed him, 
and his moment of going 

is upon us, where I’ve tried to hold him  
before he vanishes into history, into the hillside 
cemetery beneath the chiseled stones, or crosses 
the sidereal isthmus, the blue-black azimuth 
to the place I’ve always imagined beyond imagining, 
where he can perch on the crown of those hundred-year 
cottonwoods, sing for all he was worth, 
and I can let him go.