Old Orchard
Purdy Country Literary Festival
The water mill’s been gone
three generations, perhaps longer,
but the Moira contains its music.
Frogs have taken over the old pond;
Joe-Pye-weed lines the river’s banks.
The reading over, the poets disperse —
some to the forest, others walk upstream
in search of the beaver dam.
A few apples ripen on the boughs
of an abandoned orchard
despite the late spring, the cool summer.
Mahler could have understood
such isolation while nurturing
his bittersweet 9th Symphony,
a work he would never live to hear,
his health failing, his wife unfaithful.
Mahler finally died never knowing
the great acclaim that was to come.
No one will pick these apples.
They will remain long into November.
If the Moira holds the mill’s song,
truly the silent branches of these
enduring trees embody all the grace
of the extended adagio that closes his 9th.
James Deahl
Set in ZenRiver Gardens (Moira River)
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