This is something I should have read yesterday at the session.

Last year on Tom's birthday in September, I didn't want to be at home, so I headed to mid-coast Maine and partially retraced a trip Tom and I had taken 16 years before. In Cundy's Harbor I walked straight to the three prominent slate markers for poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin, his wife Ruth, and their daughter Peggy…right where Tom and I had left them sixteen years ago. Besides taking photos, I transcribed the epitaphs. RPT's was probably from one of his poems, but I've not yet located which one. I'm sure he wrote the epitaph for Ruth, and that's what I should have read at yesterday's memorial session. I teared up as I transcribed it and I choked on the last lines last fall as I read it aloud. (The stone's tympanum has three fir trees and a 6-inch band of life-sized strawberry plants – same as her husband's.)

Ruth Phillip Coffin
Died April 5, 1947

Summers, when the years were young,
You climbed this hill, you chose
This graveyard for your own between
The spruces and wild rose.

Now on this island where you found
Wild strawberries and love
You lie, in the graveyard of your choice.
And the sea winds blow above.

Deer stare at the tinkling cows.
Rest, where you chose to be.
The high fog comes in over the hill
Gray eternity.