Stark

Here in the dwellings of the inglorious living,
The collateral descendant of whom you have
Never heard returns to his dim smithy. I am

The nephew of a man named for a man
From whose nephew his uncle believed
He had descended, revolutionary battle hero

For the winning side: Saratoga, Bennington,
Bunker Hill. Too bad for Wannalancet, hardly
More distantly related. Who is most dead?

Whoever is unknown to the one doing
The reminiscing. This means that life
Goes and comes back again, around

The view down a bend in the river,
An aspect of its own perspective. Or
It never comes nor goes at all. It is

What was in the mind of what is was,
Every bronze-hammered crescent sun on the water
Beside the green memorial buried

In another book, another essay, another
Poem, another flattened conversation
In the unbrothered forge, a pond's cabin.