I mourn. Not only for you: all the dying, lies, lynching, 
my list is long, but we are here alone, you and I,
and you are gone. I am your wake. 

I postponed this ten times, held vigil
on the porch. I had to think about the words 
of eulogy, what song, what recognition. 

The forester pegged your age at two hundred years 
so I assumed you would outlive me, grand sugar maple
with tapping scars, stumps of lost limbs, and brown ridges 

of bark twisted to find better rooting, to respond
to your home in this second-growth forest of fox,
black bear and the thick silence of this summer moon. 

Two hundred years ago. Thomas Jefferson complained 
of a broken wrist while writing a letter to offer to sell 
some of his slaves to finance the University of Virginia. 

Two hundred years ago. The Missouri Compromise allowed
Missouri to become a state with slaves. Darwin launched
the Beagle. Prospectors discovered gold in Georgia. 

You stood here through Abenaki’s land claims,
cholera epidemics, Jim Crow, Hurricane Irene. 
World wars. Women and the vote. Sap flowed

to syrup. You crashed in that storm a week past. 
Wind gusts slashed through your crown of new leaves. 
I heard you thunk down beside the ash that fell last fall. 

I don’t bring music. Below the ledge, we hear coyotes
howl. Mourning doves and hawks. I speak 
my litany of loss. I praise that you knew no malice.  

You were the forest’s lungs. Shade for the sugar man. 
The owl’s post; the flying squirrel’s leap. 
What I knew of standing stature in repose. 

I wear what seems fit for your last rites –
blue jeans, riding boots, a maple leaf in my hair –
to sit astride you as I would an ancient horse:

the blue dun grullo of cave paintings. 
Bareback on your open-air sleep in wildwood
waiting for night to light your yahrzeit fireflies. 

My voice? At moonrise, I’ll ring the temple bell hung
on the younger maple and bow to the vibrations. 
Your lonely place of rest-in-peace. Mine as well. 
                        

“I have heard of a man in Maine who copied the whole Bible onto birch bark.”
-Henry David Thoreau’s journal of November 1, 1851

Before I knew what Thoreau wrote
I sent you a letter from the dogs
written on birch bark that asked
you to sniff it to know where 
they had been, how they wished
you were there. 

It must have been like that
for that man. Distilling:  

Be kind. 
Keep in mind
how hard that is,
but relish
the journey.
Ignore what is false. 
Smell the birch
to remember sweet. 
Bend it into a canoe
when you simply must
get away.