The Stone Table

Here on the hill behind the house, we sit with our feet up on the edge of the eight-by-ten stone slab that was once the floor of the cow pass that the cows used, getting from one pasture to the other without setting a hoof on the dirt road lying between them. From here we can see the blackberry thicket, the maple sapling the moose slashed with his cutting teeth, turning it scarlet too early, the bluebird boxes flown from now, the one tree left of the ancient orchard popped out all over with saffron and rosy, subacid pie apples, smaller crabs grafted with scions of old varieties, Freedom, Sops-of-Wine, Wolf River, and trees we put in ourselves, dotted with red lumps. We speak in whispers: fifty feet away, under a red spruce, a yearling bear lolls on its belly eating clover. Abruptly it sits up. Did I touch my wine glass to the table, setting it humming? The bear peers about with the bleary undressedness of old people who have mislaid their eyeglasses. It ups its muzzle and sniffs. It fixes us, whirls, and plunges into the woods— a few cracklings and shatterings, and all is still. As often happens, we find ourselves thinking similar thoughts, this time of a friend who lives to the south of that row of peaks burnt yellow in the sunset. About now, he will be paying his daily visit to her grave, reading by heart the words, cut into black granite, that she had written for him, when they both thought he would die first: I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART BUT WHAT PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU SAFE BESIDE ME. Or is he back by now, in his half-empty house, talking in ink to a piece of paper? I, who so often used to wish to float free of earth, now with all my being want to stay, to climb with you on other evenings to this stone, maybe finding a bear, or a coyote, like the one who, at dusk, a week ago, passed in his scissorish gait ten feet from where we sat— this earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely, like scions of Sheffield Seek-No-Furthers grafted for our lifetimes onto paradise root-stock.