And all that day

                                    Was a fairy tale

                                    Told once in awhile

                                    To a good child.

                               Donald Justice, "Song"

Late evening, and already he is too old and too brave to hold my hand, letting me follow him as he explores the one-lane rutted road between the two ponds and down to the edge of the nearer one.  It is green with algae and weeds that he fishes with a stick, pulling them in and casting them out again, as though he knew without my telling him how in the woods we must always replaced what we disturb, leaving the way we've come for others to make their own way of coming, even if it means losing ourselves for awhile; how going on will always bring us to another way of returning to where we began.

                                    throwing a stone

                                    farther than the ripples

                                    can reach

We cross over to the other pond, clearer and shallower, where with our coming the chorusing of frogs stops ahead of us and begins again behind us . . . I want to tell him about Basho, but not yet, and perhaps when I think it is time he will already have found him in a memory of a walk with his grandfather.  All along the shore the dogwood in their brief blooming, and each time he breaks off a twig to take them to his mother the blossoms shatter and fall, his hand empty as mine is, and perhaps in that memory he will have come to know that what is beautiful is fragile and fleeting, that it endures only in our remembering.

                                    in a single leap

                                    from here to the moon

                                    frogpond