A Unison

The grass is very green, my friend, and tousled, like the head of —— your grandson, yes? And the mountain, the mountain we climbed twenty years since for the last time (I write this thinking of you) is saw—horned as then upon the sky’s edge ——an old barn is peaked there also, fatefully, against the sky. And there it is and we can’t shift it or change it or parse it or alter it in any way. *Listen! Do you not hear them? the singing?* There it is and we’d better acknowledge it and write it down, not otherwise. Not twist the words to mean what we should have said but to mean ——what cannot be escaped: the mountain riding the afternoon as it does, the grass matted green, green underfoot and the air —— rotten wood. *Hear! Hear them! the Undying.* The hill slopes away, then rises in the middleground, you remember, with a grove of gnarled maples centering the bare pasture, sacred, surely ——for what reason? I cannot say? Idyllic! a shrine cinctured there by the trees, a certainty of music! a unison and a dance, joined at this death’s festival: Something of a shed snake’s skin, the beginning goldenrod. Or, best, a white stone, you have seen it: *Mathilda Maria Fox* ——and near the ground’s lip, all but undecipherable, *Aet Suae Anno 9* ——still there, the grass dripping of last night’s rain ——and welcome! The thin air, the near, clear brook water! ——and could not, and died, unable; to escape what the air and the wet grass —— through which, tomorrow, bejeweled, the great sun will rise ——the unchanging mountains, forced on them —— and they received, willingly! Stones, stones of a difference joing the ohters, at pace. *Hear! Hear the unison of their voices. . . .*