Poem for Mary Frazier Written a Day after Her Death

All of the pieces fit together
once we exhaust the many searches.

The transience in the cold dusk
gently lifts a veil or quilt
made out of all the puzzles
we used to form the model.

During some moods we focused on
our childhoods spent lapping
the waters of adulthoods, tongues
hanging low as we look back and
forward, shaking our heads but smiling.

Is to harden up ones values also
to soften our love for one another?

Do the most brittle of trees,
their bark aged, sturdy, of success,
still dawn to bear some fruit
in the late, bright skies of summer?

It was always about the roots,
the parts of the trees we couldn't see.
Sounds of creaking buried beneath soil
cranking out laughter and warmth.

Even after all grows to fresh heights,
the roots embed deep, grow silent,
loom up and over like sparkling stone
sunlit, a vast, visual memory echo.

Maine sits on the cusp of the ancients.
Within its trees is a moral language.
From the skin to the tips of leaves,
to the soul of the tree many feet below,
and to the ashes composed of all the leaves,
there exists a moral code most permanent.

The respect is like carving beneath the bark,
a restructuring of living material.

On a bank somewhere in the wooded middle
a cabin sits fresh, the smells distinct.
The steps to your home downtown
creak with the tones of the code too.
So does your bureau, or cabinet,
which opens when you need it most,
which gets scratched with time.

The days continue on, but the chanting
can be heard like a wheel well,
or the stones at a street's bus stop,
or the rubbing of knitting fabric,
the pennies played, our own churches
attended to in our various own ways.

Still we have the tree, the mighty
luminescence bouncing off of it,
the sunshine gliding through it,
and the dew setting to it, while
animals prepare their new homes,
build upon limbs their new chances,
live life amidst the twigs, dance,
and move about to the beat of a
swaying monument in the forest wind,
a marker in time, testament of will,
beauty that we may nap or play beneath.

The puzzles are the hardest to get
when the images are mixed and matched,
yet sometimes the hardest challenge
means the picture is most vivid.