The field you carved is vanished from the ground
There at the farmstead s fringe, reclaimed from woods below the ridge
In earth that was too rocky and too shadowed to be good;

Now from the stony heights, a clean rectangle etched into the forest crown
Shows where the field grew up when you abandoned it at last,
First to fallow grasses, then to scrub, and then to oak,
And now it is perhaps your height below the older trees around
That once marked boundary while you sweated and you coaxed
To make just three more acres pay in grain and truck.

And so your plowing and your planting, yielding corn and winter wheat,
And aches and age and weariness that gathered finally to a death
Are now exalted to the green tops of the trees.

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