Leland’s Legacy
Lean, jeans-clad, plaid
shirted
On a ladder silhouetted dark
Against a greying sky,
Leather gloved hand reaching
through
A rung to reach the chimney,
Pointing up the mortar
Against the coming winter.
So you, word by word,
Bricks down the page,
Built this image for us
Gathered by candlelight
In the Library basement,
Hanging on your words
In the air, as surely
As you hung from that ladder
Doing the necessary next
thing.
Your voice’s native lilt
Grounded in these
Firred and mapled slopes
Settled us. We saw through
Eyes of seven Vermont
Generations the virtues
Of place, of patience,
Of the inevitability of
beauty.
You prepared us for winter.
On a crystalline blue
September day you
Climbed beyond our seeing,
Leaving the ladder of your
poetry
Leaning against the solid
Reality of home.
Adrien
[Adrien makes reference to the time when Leland Kinsey read his poems to the Wednesday Poets.]
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