One Small Place

When the priests sold this property

for a dollar to the college, do you think

they knew what would come to be here?

One might think that they lived in 

unobtrusive ways, in days of solitude 

and silent prayer, but that’s the trick 

of the pastoral to soften 

the audacity of history.

Come upstairs with me 

to the library window, I’ll show you where 

their giant neon cross once stood,

a beacon for boats crossing Frenchman’s Bay.

In its place, the first hopeful students 

built a windmill, which ignited years later

from the friction of its own movement

and left a flat ring of stones which 

now faces, across the bay, an array 

of modern turbines, turning steadily.

Ours is the story of beautiful failures

and our faith in what follows. Every ruin 

beneath your feet sings of those who arrived 

and laments those who were forced to leave; 

those who cut the paths and laid the tracks, 

paved the roads and stacked the stones 

that lined the sidewalk on your first walk

to school, as someone took your hand

and held hope and grief in the other.

The earth now is as noisy as it’s ever been.

Never has it been harder to hear the calls

of birds or the commotion of insects,

the ocean’s chatter drowned out by engines 

of trade, the flow of water long since turned

to the flow of money and endless interest.

But these ways of living are not inevitable. 

Beneath those mountains are even older mountains.

Behind this sentence is a door we haven’t seen before.

Three miles from here, there’s a path in the forest

leading to the crumbled stones of an old estate

atop granite scraped by glaciers and glazed by fire.

A porcupine lives there, and a fox, regarding each other

from mossy dens on either side of the collapsed road. 

I’ll take you there, after it rains, to smell the sweet 

firs and see the few chanterelles emerging 

steadily from the litter of oak leaves,

to climb carefully down the steps

and find the moldy old boot perched

atop a stump in an empty grove,

a stage in the forest’s theatre.

There’s a common ground for us here

beyond priests and robber barons,

a place where actors and audience

change places: in the classroom, 

the field station, the auditorium.

Here, generosity is our greatest

asset, and our inheritance not 

something owned but shared in

how we tend and attend each other.

Where a child brings a box to the 

wildlife vet and removes the lid 

to show a monarch butterfly

whose fragile wings are torn. So small 

it is, beside the cages of bobcats 

and eagles; small like that child’s hands

in one moment in time, in one small place. 

Such a small thing couldn’t make a difference.

Something so small is all that makes a difference.