PIETA REVISITED
                  for Wanda

Your beauteous left hand
Slender with its graceful little finger
Holds our baby boy close
Over your bosom

For long seconds
My breath stops
As I recall every sight of your hand
Up to now

Dancing with it
Laughing with it
Twisting strands of your hair
With it
Touching my face with it
Resting it against your bare thigh

Against my heart
Against his heart
Forever for me
As Hers
In the Pieta

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NOVEMBER SNOW

In memory of Bronson Alcott
From Van Wyck Brooks

In the sheeted light of a Sunday morning
Across 140 years I was introduced
To your Gray Champion-your solar man.
Little do we know of men like him
Out of our age of mellow fire, from the
Time before machines had bolted themselves
To our lives forever and men could still
Believe that life, reduced
To its primacy, was the only ointment
For the searing burns suffered by
Hurtling into walls of steel.  So
He kept upon him clothes with holes.  He
Chopped wood to the admiration of the
Concord fathers.  His wife and daughters
Tended to the less fortunate.
His theories on educating children scoffed
At in America but taken seriously on
The Continent.  Sandals made of canvas.
A vegetarian.  A man of no resources
Who fed his family on his
Own turnips and apples and supported
Them with the daily work of a Zen monk.
All of these facts, though,  are not
Quite the meat of this poem.  The
Northwest winds like a cold, slow hammer
Pushed down that day the first flat clouds
Of snow.  Their density lidded the
Daylight.  Around mid-afternoon the snow
Started.  The flakes coated the bent-over
Leaves of comfrey still a pulsing
Dark, dark green.  Even I could not
Care about their rotted blackness
In the days that followed.  Who
Could care about the family man
Who lent Thoreau his ax?

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Barry Greenawalt — Working as a teacher.  Writing, working on a new novel.  Wanda and I have a new son, Jonah.  Warm wind.