​Visiting Fort Juniper
for Robert Francis

Mid-winter when I first drove out to meet him,
Snow on the ground, the fort a cabin in the woods
North of Amherst, dark inside as a smokehouse,
The day’s fire tended several times by then.
He’d have been 72, thin as some desert acetic—​
Quick, hermitic, attentive as the birds he fed
And wrote about, a new book, The Ghosts of Eagles,
Coming out in the spring. (“Here is the holy,
Here th