Even adamantine edifices of rock
erode, the soft wind and rain
corrode first the charming dimple
then seep in the wrinkle and rut.
The smoothest surface bears the incision
of storm’s pitons, and with burnished grips
the sheerest plane can be climbed.
How soft the tune of everlasting.
Water sings, and rock sways.

Antitheses of wilderness or scrubland, 
Dad sustained a library of orderliness,
a decimal exactness to the placement of books,
music, lamp and light, the pad by the phone
and the generic pen, the basement
of storage containers marked, dated.
That was why, my mother said, he needed
the outdoors, the haphazard, selection
of placement by other forces than his own hand.

As a young parent, his trips among trees had no meander.
He walked the same routes in and out, 
even if the trails inside the woods might differ, 
the same ponds and creeks with similar reeds, 
the deer paths crossed only in November,
snagged by the same tips of barbed wire,
the spaniel running her figure eights
as if eternity lived in her rustling gait.

Later in life, he worked with butternut, restored cabinets
not to an original hue—he worked for a burnished honey,
an aging yellow, as if trapped in the resin
of time, of a time made more real by the sealing,
as if the living wood was drawn out again
with original clarity, the grain, knots, and vessels
with the checkmarks and wax of age removed.

All woods were replicas of that first wood
when his father stood at the road near their house 
and let him wander in the hardwoods alone. 
To work with wood meant those same trees
that had populated his loneliness as a boy, friends, 
had returned. Fingertips cracked from sanding the wood
reminded him of the endless climbing of branches, 
and the stain like the wood wet from a summer rain.