A ballad from the green wood, written for you

The Fourteenth Ballad: The Book Left Open

I kept a book four years alone, and every page was ruled,
every name set down in ink, every loss fulfilled.
But a letter came that was never sealed. It lay beneath a stone
where the road could find it, for feet not stopped at home.
And a hand I would call the stranger's turned to be the one I knew,
and a name I would ruled into the margin looked back at me askew.

I cut six pages with a brass-hand knife and dated every one,
the hand that wrote the dates wrote small, a man not wholly done.
I turned a stone from her old wall and found it only weight.
I looked for words in granite. Some things sit and wait.

And the book, the book of names: I left it open wide
at the page where Ruth is written, pencil in the gutter's side.
I stopped keeping. I started leaving a door ajar in the dark,
the way a lamp stays lit for a daughter coming back.

The will was tired today, they tell me, the road went sick and thin.
But roads don't need the walker strong to hold the shape he's in.
and if the book stays open on her page, the lamp in the sill,
the door is ajar, the letter's found. The book was never mine to bear.