“He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which

he cooked his supper

toward evening

in the Ohio forests. He wore

a sackcloth shirt and walked

barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went

the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely

as young girls.

No Indian or settler or wild beast

ever harmed him, and he for his part honored

everything, all God's creatures! thought little,

on a rainy night,

of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching

flesh with any creatures there: snakes,

racoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.

Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,

at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,

recalled: he spoke

only once of women and his gray eyes

brittled into ice. "Some

are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt

the pain of it, remembered it

into her old age.

Well, the trees he planted or gave away

prospered, and he became

the good legend, you do

what you can if you can; whatever

the secret, and the pain,

there's a decision: to die,

or to live, to go on

caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,

in the forests that are left you can still find

sign of him: patches

of cold white fire."

“John Chapman"

Mary Oliver