In Memoriam Russell Durgin (1924-1985)

Then he went into his bed and he was saying it was
destroyed he was, the time the shadow was going up
through the glen. [J. M. Synge]

I am eating an apple picked
from the very top of the tree, sweet,
crisp and the palest of green.
My two boys race downhill, leaving
in the deep yellow meadowgrass a wake

of breathless laughter. To his six-year-
old godson the master teacher,
hunched under the painful sprouting
of wings, offered a first
and last lesson in fire-building:

Five, six, pick up sticks. Seven,
eight, lay them straight. Then
the terrifying matches hastily dropped—
the boy so serious at the task. Now,
down they go, the boy and his brother,

with years of meadows ahead of them,
diminishing away from me, godless
beside the appletree, down and down
to the bloodred farm, its roof
of blazing metal, extinguished

as the witless shadow of a cloud
bruises the grass, filling the hollows
where the deer have lain, numbing
the morning so that laughter
becomes a questionable memory. Did ever

the deer nestle at night so close
to walls where prayers of fire gushed
out of hollow logs? Were there indeed but now
two children echoing the laughter
of so many snows ago? My good old friend

says eat the apples before they
touch the ground. They spoil so soon,
their pale skins bruised by the same
cruel dark that follows boys downhill
and gives their cries of joy to others' mouths.