and nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
to please the boy by giving him the half hour
that a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
to tell them ’Supper’. At the word, the saw,
as if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
he must have given the hand. However it was,
neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh.
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
half in appeal, but half as if to keep
the life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
since he was old enough to know, big boy
doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
he saw all spoiled. ’Don’t let him cut my hand off
the doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
A Brook in the City1
The farm house lingers, though averse to square
with the new city street it has to wear
a number in. But what about the brook
that held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
and impulse, having dipped a finger length
and made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
a flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
from growing under pavements of a town;
the apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
no longer needed? Staunch it at its source
with cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
in fetid darkness still to live and run—
and all for nothing it had ever done
except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
that such a brook ran water. But I wonder
if from its being kept forever under
the thoughts may not have risen that so keep
this new-built city from both work and sleep.
A Dream Pang2
I had withdrawn in forest, and my song
was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway;
and to the forest edge you came one day
(this was my dream) and looked and pondered long,
but did not enter, though the wish was strong:
you shook your pensive head as who should say,
‘I dare not—too far in his footsteps stray—
he must seek me would he undo the wrong.
Not far, but near, I stood and saw it all
behind low boughs the trees let down outside;
and the sweet pang it cost me not to call
and tell you that I saw does still abide.
But ‘tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof,
for the wood wakes, and you are here for proof.
A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears, and Some Books1
Old Davis owned a solid mica mountain
in Dalton that would someday make his fortune.
There’d been some Boston people out to see it:
and experts said that deep down in the mountain
the mica sheets were big as plate-glass windows.
He’d like to take me there and show it to me.
“I’ll tell you what you show me. You remember
you said you knew the place where once, on Kinsman,
the early Mormons made a settlement
and built a stone baptismal font outdoors—
but Smith, or someone, called them off the mountain
to go West to a worse fight with the desert.
You said you’d seen the stone baptismal font.
Well, take me there.”
“Someday I will.”
“Today.”
“Huh, that old bathtub, what is that to see?
Let’s talk about it.”
“Let’s go see the place.”
“To shut you up I’ll tell you what I’ll do:
I’ll find that fountain if it takes all summer,
and both of our united strengths, to do it.”
“You’ve lost it, then?”
“Not so but I can find it.
No doubt it’s grown up some to woods around it.
The mountain may have shifted since I saw it
in eighty-five.”
“As long ago as that?”
“If I remember rightly, it had sprung
a leak and emptied then. And forty years
can do a good deal to bad masonry.
You won’t see any Mormon swimming in it.
But you have said it, and we’re off to find it.
Old as I am, I’m going to let myself
be dragged by you all over everywhere——”
“I thought you were a guide.”
“I am a guide,
and that’s why I can’t decently refuse you.”
We made a day of it out of the world,
ascending to descend to reascend.
The old man seriously took his bearings,
and spoke his doubts in every open place.
We came out on a look-off where we faced
a cliff, and on the cliff a bottle painted,
or stained by vegetation from above,
a likeness to surprise the thrilly tourist.
“Well, if I haven’t brought you to the fountain,
at least I’ve brought you to the famous Bottle.”
“I won’t accept the substitute. It’s empty.”
“So’s everything.”
“I want my fountain.”
“I guess you’d find the fountain just as empty.
And anyway this tells me where I am.”
“Hadn’t you long suspected where you were?”
“You mean miles from that Mormon settlement?
Look here, you treat your guide with due respect
if you don’t want to spend the night outdoors.
I vow we must be near the place from where
the two converging slides, the avalanches,
on Marshall, look like Donkey's ears.
We may as well see that and save the day.”
“Don’t Donkey's ears suggest we shake our own?”
“For God’s sake, aren’t you fond of viewing nature?
You don’t like nature. All you like is books.
What signify a Donkey's ears and bottle,
however natural? Give you your books!
Well then, right here is where I show you books.
Come straight down off this mountain just as fast
as we can fall and keep a-bouncing on our feet.
It’s hell for knees unless done hell-for-leather.”
Be ready, I thought, for almost anything.
We struck a road I didn’t recognize,
but welcomed for the chance to lave my shoes
in dust once more. We followed this a mile,
perhaps, to where it ended at a house
I didn’t know was there. It was the kind
to bring me to for broad-board paneling.
I never saw so good a house deserted.
“Excuse me if I ask you in a window
&
nbsp; that happens to be broken,” Davis said.
“The outside doors as yet have held against us.
I want to introduce you to the people
who used to live here. They were Robinsons.
You must have heard of Clara Robinson,
the poetess who wrote the book of verses
and had it published. It was all about
the posies on her inner windowsill,
and the birds on her outer windowsill,
and how she tended both, or had them tended:
she never tended anything herself.
She was ’shut in’ for life. She lived her whole
life long in bed, and wrote her things in bed.
I’ll show you how she had her sills extended
to entertain the birds and hold the flowers.
Our business first’s up attic with her books.”
We trod uncomfortably on crunching glass
through a house stripped of everything
except, it seemed, the poetess’s poems.
Books, I should say!—if books are what is needed.
A whole edition in a packing case
that, overflowing like a horn of plenty,
or like the poetess’s heart of love,
had spilled them near the window, toward the light
where driven rain had wet and swollen them.
Enough to stock a village library—
unfortunately all of one kind, though.
They had been brought home from some publisher
and taken thus into the family.
Boys and bad hunters had known what to do
with stone and lead to unprotected glass:
shatter it inward on the unswept floors.
How had the tender verse escaped their outrage?
By being invisible for what it was,
or else by some remoteness that defied them
to find out what to do to hurt a poem.
Yet oh! the tempting flatness of a book,
to send it sailing out the attic window
till it caught wind and, opening out its covers,
tried to improve on sailing like a tile
by flying like a bird (silent in flight,
but all the burden of its body song),
only to tumble like a stricken bird,
and lie in stones and bushes unretrieved.
Books were not thrown irreverently about.
They simply lay where someone now and then,
having tried one, had dropped it at his feet
and left it lying where it fell rejected.
Here were all those the poetess’s life
had been too short to sell or give away.
“Take one,” Old Davis bade me graciously.
“Why not take two or three?”
“Take all you want.
Good-looking books like that.” He picked one fresh
in virgin wrapper from deep in the box,
and stroked it with a horny-handed kindness.
He read in one and I read in another,
both either looking for or finding something.
The attic wasps went missing by like bullets.
I was soon satisfied for the time being.
All the way home I kept remembering
the small book in my pocket. It was there.
The poetess had sighed, I knew, in heaven
at having eased her heart of one more copy—
legitimately. My demand upon her,
though slight, was a demand. She felt the tug.
In time she would be rid of all her books.
A Late Walk1
When I go up through the mowing field,
the headless aftermath,
smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
half closes the garden path.
And when I come to the garden ground,
the whir of sober birds
up from the tangle of withered weeds
is sadder than any words
a tree beside the wall stands bare,
but a leaf that lingered brown,
disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
comes softly rattling down.
I end not far from my going forth
by picking the faded blue
of the last remaining aster flower
to carry again to you.
After Apple-Picking2
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
toward heaven still,
and there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
beside it, and there may be two or three
apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
the scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
and held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
upon my way to sleep before it fell,
and I could tell
what form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
stem end and blossom end,
and every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
it keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
the rumbling sound
of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
of apple-picking: I am overtired
of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
that struck the earth,
no matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
went surely to the cider-apple heap
as of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
this sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
the woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
or just some human sleep.
An Old Man’s Winter Night1
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
that gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
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,
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 25
