A dwindling band of Benedictines like disciples in The Acts
travel down the road two by two to Milbank, to Nebraska,
to Assumption in North Dakota. Their monastery closed,
their church, Our Lady of the Snow, gracing a for-sale sign.

The last order for vestments barely got finished. Brother
Sebastian the tailor called in his (blood) sister to help.
Then he packed his brown suitcase and hit the road, too.
As did the caged birds–one day twitting in a glass wall case,

the next, en route to a near-by convent. Startling
it’d been coming upon birds in the hallway to the refectory,
hearing their patient, dutiful chirps fill time like the sisters
who hang on, still able enough to clip coupons for children’s

wheelchairs. With birds, imagination must enter. A last
huzzah, an adé to Our Lady’s gardens, trails, bell tower,
graveyard, the apples swelling in summer heat, the sky
imprinted with swallows, grackles, and robins in flight.

It will take a little courage
to finish this book
that I do not want to end.
I ration the pages
as on certain nights
I ration love,
but passion draws us on.

This life too—
my woods, my work,
to see the garden through
to the stripped harvest.
I can’t even imagine
my last look at the sea.

But we must see
the story to its end;
our passion draws us on.
We lust for the finish.

It takes courage to live,
they tell me, which is true,
though some of it comes
down to the courage not to.

(Pinus contorta)

When a lodgepole succumbs
to the snow and the wind and leans out
over a lake, dipping its branch tips
into the water, the trunk will lose
its roughcast bark and turn
white and smooth in an afterlife
of moon and sun.  And before
the ants have completed their work,
dusting the waves with the last
of their indigestible powders,
the trunk will abrade to a gossamer
surface of fine white hairs—
fine as the silk on the head of a child,
as the wispy down above the lip
of a grandmother, bent with age.

—Alpine Lakes Wilderness

I plant trees from nursery stock,
Ponderosa and lodgepole
Mountain ash and syringa,
Some years ten,
Other years a hundred.

I water the new ones
Using a pasta pot
Dipped into a mountain stream
Then carried in ever-widening circles
With the hope that a few gallons
Will make a difference.

It can be hard work
And some days I begrudge them
Their smallness.
Only a few
Will clear my head height
Before I die
None tramadol overnight saturday delivery will ever be tall enough
To provide me with shade
Or strong enough
To hang my hammock upon.
I have no patience,
No kids to think about,
No clear sense
Of an obligation to future generations.

But today as I stooped to the river
Complaining of my bad back
And my aching hip,
My silver bucket
Caught the sun just right
And a spawning salmon
Moved without moving
Out of shadow
Toward me.