Poem In Thanks

Surveyor, seeker, poet of the sound,
you love nothing more than these monkeys
aswing in the trees. And carefree
you hand out fifties like chump-change
to the needy, though your bank book’s
a graveyard: filled with dust and hope.
Yet your eyes are a mother hen’s
and a fighting cock’s. Plus that voice:
wind-from-the-reeds, oracular.
It leads us like a rainbow
to no source, no hidden treasure,
just an office stuffed with books,
and in one corner a worn brown desk…
across which you’ve roamed like a lion
across his plain, or like Sumner
(Massachusetts’ own!) walking the battlefield
after Antietam: brooding, animal,
his American heart in a thousand pieces
as he touched the blood-stained world
step by step. How clear this morning, Thomas,
your footprints through the trampled grass!

Seth Michelson