“now when I walk here alone, the thought of you goes with me; my mind reaches towards yours across the distance and through time. No mortal mind’s complete within itself, but minds must speak and answer, as ours must, on the subject of this place, our history here, summoned as we are to the correction of old wrong in this soil, thinned and broken, and in our minds. You have seen on these gullied slopes the piles of stones mossy with age, dragged out of furrows long ago by men now names on stones, who cleared and broke these fields, saw them go to ruin, learned nothing from the trees they saw return to hold the ground again. But here is a clearing we have made at no cost to the world and to our gain- a re-clearing after forty years: the thicket cut level with the ground, grasses and clovers sown into the last year’s fallen leaves, new pasture coming to the sun as the woods plants, lovers of shade, give way: change made without violence to the ground. At evening birdcall flares at the woods’ edge; flight arcs into the opening before nightfall. Out of disordered history a little coherence, a pattern comes, like the steadying of a rhythm on a drum, melody coming to it from time to time, waking over it, as from a bird at dawn or nightfall, the long outline emerging through the momentary, as the hill’s hard shoulder shows through trees when the leaves fall. The field finds its source in the old forest, in the thicket that returned to cover it, in the dark wilderness of its soil, in the dispensations of the sky, in our time, in our minds- the righting of what was done wrong.”