For Jim, Easter Eve

If ever a garden was Gethsemane, with old tombs set high against the crumpled olive tree--and lichen, this, my garden, has been to me. For such as I none other is so sweet: Lacking old tombs, here stands my grief, and certainly its ancient tree. Peace is here and in every season a quiet beauty. The sky falling about me evenly to the compass . . . What is sorrow but tenderness now in this earth-close frame of land and sky falling constantly into horizons of east and west, north and south; what is pain but happiness here amid these green and wordless patterns,-- indefinite texture of blade and leaf: Beauty of an old, old tree, last comfort in Gethsemane.