Maple Syrup

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk 
into the graveyard, to find
my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago 
I came here last, bringing
marigolds from the round garden 
outside the kitchen.
I didn’t know you then.
  We walk
among carved names that go with photographs
on top of the piano at the farm:
Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck. 
We pause at the new grave
of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s 
sister. Last summer
we called on her at the nursing home, 
eighty-seven, and nodding
in a blue housedress. We cannot find 
my grandfather’s grave.
  Back at the house
where no one lives, we potter 
and explore the back chamber
where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels, 
pretty boxes, quilts,
bottles, books, albums of postcards. 
Then with a flashlight we descend 
firm steps to the root cellar—black, 
cobwebby, huge,
with dirt floors and fieldstone walls, 
and above the walls, holding the hewn 
sills of the house, enormous
granite foundation stones.
Past the empty bins
for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes,
we discover the shelves for canning, a few
pale pints
of tomato left, and—what
is this?—syrup, maple syrup 
in a quart jar, syrup
my grandfather made twenty-five 
years ago
for the last time.
 I remember
coming to the farm in March
in sugaring time, as a small boy.
He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart 
buckets, dangling from each end 
of a wooden yoke
that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them 
into a vat in the saphouse 
where fire burned day and night 
for a week.
  Now the saphouse 
tilts, nearly to the ground, 
like someone exhausted
to the point of death, and next winter
when snow piles three feet thick 
on the roofs of the cold farm,
the saphouse will shudder and slide 
with the snow to the ground.
 Today
we take my grandfather’s last 
quart of syrup
upstairs, holding it gingerly,
and we wash off twenty-five years 
of dirt, and we pull
and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff, 
dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers
in, you and I both, and taste
the sweetness, you for the first time,
the sweetness preserved, of a dead man 
in the kitchen he left
when his body slid
like anyone’s into the ground.