Claremont, 245

A big rock-maple takes my headstone in slow swallow, the slate asleep while its willow weeps with inward, earthward strength. Like chilamates we send down eager root-mass from every branch. Deep, back, past the rising balconies from which all these hundred years wave, these hundred-fifty years, these two-hundred years. New England. We took to the tides and didn't rejoin the schooner till our duri was good and full with about half an inch freeboard. Women working the kitchen's smoke, wise, smiling women who've made us up like stories, watch through the ventanilla del cuecho as we come up from the boats.