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featureIn the autumn of 1988, the signal generosity of agroup of Park and Park Tudor alumni enabled Gloria, mylate wife, and me to make our first and only trip to Irelandand the UK. This is the one “literary” result of that happyexperience, which appeared in the March 2005 number of“The Hardy Society Journal.”– Jim FoxlowIn Stinsford Churchyard, Dorset(For Thomas Hardy)Inside church-hatch we find your family graves.You made old bones but they do not lie here,Only your heart. It bears a heavy weight,Though not so heavy, it may be, as thatWhich consciousness laid on it when you lived.For sixty years that heart has been enclosedIn Wessex soil; but just as you once heardSome long-dead villagers speak from growingthingsIn this same churchyard, so we pilgrims catch,From the ivy, yew and laurel of the place,Vague murmurs of the honest lines you wrought.She takes my arm, and we approach the church.A gurgoyle on a corner of the towerRevives the Weatherbury imp whose mouth spatrainInto the midst of Fanny Robbin’s grave.Inside the porch a copy of your sketchOf the interior as it looked beforeThe gallery was pulled down calls up the strainsOf strings and serpents turning out a psalm—The Mellstock quire you knew in backward days.And now more distant choristers chime in,Practicing a new hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light,”While Bathsheba and Oak move, whispering,Among the mounds outside. — The vision fades.We turn towards your county town and markThe irony, which you might have appreciated,That you, who bore estrangement from the oneWho at the first put magic in your eyes,Should from your mould have brought two loverscloser.Jim Foxlow, who has taken up woodworking in his retirement years,constructs a Shaker-style table at a workshop in Maine.18 park tudor phoenix FALL 2007