Survivor, Walking

                    Malcolm Cowley, at Yaddo

He knew the stories he could tell
          like his own garden, well.
And then he knew the woods, could tame
          each wildness with a name.
          Fondly he rapped the knees
          of ancient, familiar trees

with his green beechwood hiking staff.
          Their silence swelled his laugh
as he saluted those careers
          he’d followed forty years.
          Half rot, half youthful still,
          growth was their only skill.

“Across this trunk note how the sun
          shows burnished cinnamon.”
(His loud, half-deaf discourse.) “The bark
          no longer looks just dark,
          it lives a hundred years
          or so, till this appears.”

Growling in anger once, he stopped
          before some spruces lopped
(years back) at the neck for Christmas trees.
          He cried, “Now look at these
          some bastard has got at!
          Who’d do a thing like that?”

One birch, in a woodlot maples won,
          leaned there, a veteran
stripped naked, where its sun had failed.
          Even this one he hailed
          like an impoverished friend
          remembered to the end.

At home, on trees pulped down, he wrote
          critique and anecdote.
Working out front, working backstage
          he chronicled his age
          and by this balanced act
          delivered up the fact.

On walks he still hails trees recalled
          by name, or stops, enthralled
by one no logger has cut down
          and lightning missed, whose crown
          rails yet against the sky,
          still at it, green and spry.

He will not hear us, not by half.
          Silences make him laugh.
Beyond our powers to persuade
          he drops his hearing aid
          and marches to the woods
          to join his earthly goods.