The Giant Book of Poetry (2006)

by William H. Roetzheim

What kept him from remembering what it was

  that brought him to that creaking room was age.

  He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.

  And having scared the cellar under him

  in clomping there, he scared it once again

  in clomping off;—and scared the outer night,

  which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar

  of trees and crack of branches, common things,

  but nothing so like beating on a box.

  A light he was to no one but himself

  where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,

  a Quiet light, and then not even that.

  He consigned to the moon, such as she was,

  so late-arising, to the broken moon

  as better than the sun in any case

  for such a charge, his snow upon the roof,

  his icicles along the wall to keep;

  and slept. The log that shifted with a jolt

  once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,

  and eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.

  One aged man—one man—can’t keep a house,

  a farm, a countryside, or if he can,

  it’s thus he does it of a winter night.

  Birches2

  When I see birches bend to left and right

  across the lines of straighter darker trees,

  I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

  But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

  as ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

  loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

  after a rain. They click upon themselves

  as the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

  as the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

  Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

  shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

  such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

  you’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

  They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

  and they seem not to break;

  though once they are bowed

  so low for long, they never right themselves:

  you may see their trunks arching in the woods

  years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

  like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

  before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

  But I was going to say when Truth broke in

  with all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

  I should prefer to have some boy bend them

  as he went out and in to fetch the cows—

  some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

  whose only play was what he found himself,

  summer or winter, and could play alone.

  One by one he subdued his father’s trees

  by riding them down over and over again

  until he took the stiffness out of them,

  and not one but hung limp, not one was left

  for him to conquer. He learned all there was

  to learn about not launching out too soon

  and so not carrying the tree away

  clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

  to the top branches, climbing carefully

  with the same pains you use to fill a cup

  up to the brim, and even above the brim.

  Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

  kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

  So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

  And so I dream of going back to be.

  It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

  and life is too much like a pathless wood

  where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

  broken across it, and one eye is weeping

  from a twig’s having lashed across it open.

  I’d like to get away from earth awhile

  and then come back to it and begin over.

  May no fate willfully misunderstand me

  and half grant what I wish and snatch me away

  not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

  I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

  I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

  and climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

  toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

  but dipped its top and set me down again.

  That would be good both going and coming back.

  One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

  Death of the Hired Man1

  Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table

  waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,

  she ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage

  to meet him in the doorway with the news

  and put him on his guard. “Silas is back.”

  She pushed him outward with her through the door

  and shut it after her. “Be kind,” she said.

  She took the market things from Warren’s arms

  and set them on the porch, then drew him down

  to sit beside her on the wooden steps.

  “When was I ever anything but kind to him?

  But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he said.

  “I told him so last haying, didn’t I?

  ‘If he left then,’ I said, ’that ended it.’

  What good is he? Who else will harbor him

  at his age for the little he can do?

  What help he is there’s no depending on.

  Off he goes always when I need him most.

  ‘He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,

  enough at least to buy tobacco with,

  so he won’t have to beg and be beholden.’

  ‘All right,’ I say, ’I can’t afford to pay

  any fixed wages, though I wish I could.’

  ‘Someone else can.’ ’Then someone else will have to.’

  I shouldn’t mind his bettering himself

  if that was what it was. You can be certain,

  when he begins like that, there’s someone at him

  trying to coax him off with pocket-money,—

  in haying time, when any help is scarce.

  In winter he comes back to us. I’m done.”

  “Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you,” Mary said.

  “I want him to: he’ll have to soon or late.”

  “He’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove.

  When I came up from Rowe’s I found him here,

  huddled against the barn-door fast asleep,

  a miserable sight, and frightening, too—

  you needn’t smile—I didn’t recognize him—

  I wasn’t looking for him—and he’s changed.

  Wait till you see.”

  “Where did you say he’d been?”

  “He didn’t say. I dragged him to the house,

  and gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.

  I tried to make him talk about his travels.

  Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off.”

  “What did he say? Did he say anything?”

  “But little.”

  “Anything? Mary, confess

  he said he’d come to ditch the meadow for me.”

  “Warren!”

  “But did he? I just want to know.”

  “Of course he did. What would you have him say?

  Surely you wouldn’t grudge the poor old man

  some humble way to save his self-respect.

  He added, if you really care to know,

  he meant to clear the upper pasture, too.

  That sounds like something you have heard before?

  Warren, I wish you could have heard the way

  he jumbled everything. I stopped to look

  two or three times—he made me feel so queer—

  to see if
he was talking in his sleep.

  He ran on Harold Wilson—you remember—

  the boy you had in haying four years since.

  He’s finished school, and teaching in his college.

  Silas declares you’ll have to get him back.

  He says they two will make a team for work:

  between them they will lay this farm as smooth!

  The way he mixed that in with other things.

  He thinks young Wilson a likely lad, though daft

  on education—you know how they fought

  all through July under the blazing sun,

  Silas up on the cart to build the load,

  Harold along beside to pitch it on.”

  “Yes, I took care to keep well out of earshot.”

  “Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream.

  You wouldn’t think they would. How some things linger!

  Harold’s young college boy’s assurance piqued him.

  After so many years he still keeps finding

  good arguments he sees he might have used.

  I sympathize. I know just how it feels

  to think of the right thing to say too late.

  Harold’s associated in his mind with Latin.

  He asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying

  he studied Latin like the violin

  because he liked it—that an argument!

  He said he couldn’t make the boy believe

  he could find water with a hazel prong—

  which showed how much good

  school had ever done him.

  He wanted to go over that. But most of all

  he thinks if he could have another chance

  to teach him how to build a load of hay—”

  “I know, that’s Silas’ one accomplishment.

  He bundles every forkful in its place,

  and tags and numbers it for future reference,

  so he can find and easily dislodge it

  in the unloading. Silas does that well.

  He takes it out in bunches like big birds’ nests.

  You never see him standing on the hay

  he’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.”

  “He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be

  some good perhaps to someone in the world.

  He hates to see a boy the fool of books.

  Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,

  and nothing to look backward to with pride,

  and nothing to look forward to with hope,

  so now and never any different.”

  Part of a moon was falling down the west,

  dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.

  Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw

  and spread her apron to it. She put out her hand

  among the harp-like morning-glory strings,

  taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,

  as if she played unheard the tenderness

  that wrought on him beside her in the night.

  “Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:

  you needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”

  “Home,” he mocked gently.

  “Yes, what else but home?

  It all depends on what you mean by home.

  Of course he’s nothing to us, any more

  than was the hound that came a stranger to us

  out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

  they have to take you in.”

  “I should have called it

  something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

  Warren leaned out and took a step or two,

  picked up a little stick, and brought it back

  and broke it in his hand and tossed it by.

  “Silas has better claim on us you think

  than on his brother? Thirteen little miles

  as the road winds would bring him to his door.

  Silas has walked that far no doubt to-day.

  Why didn’t he go there? His brother’s rich,

  a somebody—director in the bank.”

  “He never told us that.”

  “We know it though.”

  “I think his brother ought to help, of course.

  I’ll see to that if there is need. He ought of right

  to take him in, and might be willing to—

  he may be better than appearances.

  But have some pity on Silas. Do you think

  if he’d had any pride in claiming kin

  or anything he looked for from his brother,

  he’d keep so still about him all this time?”

  “I wonder what’s between them.”

  “I can tell you.

  Silas is what he is—we wouldn’t mind him—

  but just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.

  He never did a thing so very bad.

  He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good

  as anybody, worthless though he is.

  he won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.”

  “I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone.”

  “No, but he hurt my heart the way he lay

  and rolled his old head on that sharp-edged chair-back.

  He wouldn’t let me put him on the lounge.

  You must go in and see what you can do.

  I made the bed up for him there to-night.

  You’ll be surprised at him—how much he’s broken.

  His working days are done; I’m sure of it.”

  “I’d not be in a hurry to say that.”

  “I haven’t been. Go, look, see for yourself.

  But, Warren, please remember how it is:

  he’s come to help you ditch the meadow.

  He has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him.

  He may not speak of it, and then he may.

  I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud

  will hit or miss the moon.”

  It hit the moon.

  Then there were three there, making a dim row,

  the moon, the little silver cloud, and she.

  Warren returned—too soon, it seemed to her,

  slipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited.

  “Warren,” she questioned.

  “Dead,” was all he answered.

  Fire and Ice1

  Some say the world will end in fire;

  some say in ice.

  From what I’ve tasted of desire

  I hold with those who favor fire.

  But if it had to perish twice,

  I think I know enough of hate

  to know that for destruction ice

  is also great

  and would suffice.

  For Once, Then, Something2

  Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs

  always wrong to the light, so never seeing

  deeper down in the well than where the water

  gives me back in a shining surface picture

  me myself in the summer heaven godlike

  looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

  Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,

  I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

  through the picture, a something white, uncertain,

  something more of the depths—and then I lost it.

  Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

  One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

  shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

  blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

  Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

  Good-by and Keep Cold1

  This saying good-by on the edge of the dark

  and the cold to an orchard so young in the bark

  reminds me of all that can happen to harm

  an orchard away at the end of the farm

  all winter, cut off by a
hill from the house.

  I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,

  I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse

  by deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.

  (If certain it wouldn’t be idle to call

  I’d summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall

  and warn them away with a stick for a gun.)

  I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.

  (We made it secure against being, I hope,

  by setting it out on a northerly slope.)

  No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;

  but one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.

  ‘How often already you’ve had to be told,

  keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.

  Dread fifty above more than fifty below.’

  I have to be gone for a season or so.

  My business awhile is with different trees,

  less carefully nurtured, less fruitful than these,

  and such as is done to their wood with an ax—

  maples and birches and tamaracks.

  I wish I could promise to lie in the night

  and think of an orchard’s arboreal plight

  when slowly (and nobody comes with a light)

  its heart sinks lower under the sod.

  But something has to be left to God.

  Home Burial1

  He saw her from the bottom of the stairs

  before she saw him. She was starting down,

  looking back over her shoulder at some fear.

  She took a doubtful step and then undid it

  to raise herself and look again. He spoke

  advancing toward her: ’What is it you see

  from up there always—for I want to know.’

  She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,

  and her face changed from terrified to dull.

  He said to gain time: ’What is it you see,’

  mounting until she cowered under him.

  ‘I will find out now—you must tell me, dear.’

  She, in her place, refused him any help

  with the least stiffening of her neck and silence.

  She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see,

  blind creature; and awhile he didn’t see.

  But at last he murmured, ’Oh,’ and again, ’Oh.’

  ‘What is it—what?’ she said.

  ‘Just that I see.’

  ‘You don’t,’ she challenged. ’Tell me what it is.’

  ‘The wonder is I didn’t see at once.

  I never noticed it from here before.

  I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason.

  The little graveyard where my people are!

  So small the window frames the whole of it.