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I didn’t try to.

It can scarce be that they would be in number

We’d care to know, for we are not young now.

And bang goes something else away off there.

It sounds as if it were the men went down,

And every crash meant one less to return

To lighted city streets we, too, have known,

But now are giving up for country darkness.”

 

“Come from that window where you see too much for me,

And take a livelier view of things from here.

They’re going. Watch this husky swarming up

Over the wheel into the sky-high seat,

Lighting his pipe now, squinting down his nose

At the flame burning downward as he sucks it.”

 

“See how it makes his nose-side bright, a proof

How dark it’s getting. Can you tell what time

It is by that? Or by the moon? The new moon!

What shoulder did I see her over? Neither.

A wire she is of silver, as new as we

To everything. Her light won’t last us long.

It’s something, though, to know we’re going to have her

Night after night and stronger every night

To see us through our first two weeks. But, Joe,

The stove! Before they go! Knock on the window;

Ask them to help you get it on its feet.

We stand here dreaming. Hurry! Call them back!”

 

“They’re not gone yet.”

 

19

“We’ve got to have the stove,

Whatever else we want for. And a light.

Have we a piece of candle if the lamp

And oil are buried out of reach?”

Again

The house was full of tramping, and the dark,

Door-filling men burst in and seized the stove.

A cannon-mouth-like hole was in the wall,

To which they set it true by eye; and then

Came up the jointed stovepipe in their hands,

So much too light and airy for their strength

It almost seemed to come ballooning up,

Slipping from clumsy clutches toward the ceiling.

“A fit!” said one, and banged a stovepipe shoulder.

“It’s good luck when you move in to begin

With good luck with your stovepipe. Never mind,

It’s not so bad in the country, settled down,

When people’re getting on in life. You’ll like it.”

Joe said: “You big boys ought to find a farm,

And make good farmers, and leave other fellows

The city work to do. There’s not enough

For everybody as it is in there.”

“God!” one said wildly, and, when no one spoke:

“Say that to Jimmy here. He needs a farm.”

But Jimmy only made his jaw recede

Fool-like, and rolled his eyes as if to say

He saw himself a farmer. Then there was a French boy

Who said with seriousness that made them laugh,

“Ma friend, you ain’t know what it is you’re ask.”

He doffed his cap and held it with both hands

Across his chest to make as ’twere a bow:

“We’re giving you our chances on de farm.”

And then they all turned to with deafening boots

And put each other bodily out of the house.

“Goodby to them! We puzzle them. They think––

20

I don’t know what they think we see in what

They leave us to: that pasture slope that seems

The back some farm presents us; and your woods

To northward from your window at the sink,

Waiting to steal a step on us whenever

We drop our eyes or turn to other things,

As in the game ‘Ten-step’ the children play.”

 

“Good boys they seemed, and let them love the city.

All they could say was ‘God!’ when you proposed

Their coming out and making useful farmers.”

 

“Did they make something lonesome go through you?

It would take more than them to sicken you––

Us of our bargain. But they left us so

As to our fate, like fools past reasoning with.

They almost shook me.”

 

“It’s all so much

What we have always wanted, I confess

It’s seeming bad for a moment makes it seem

Even worse still, and so on down, down, down.

It’s nothing; it’s their leaving us at dusk.

I never bore it well when people went.

The first night after guests have gone, the house

Seems haunted or exposed. I always take

A personal interest in the locking up

At bedtime; but the strangeness soon wears off.”

He fetched a dingy lantern from behind

A door. “There’s that we didn’t lose! And these!”––

Some matches he unpocketed. “For food––

The meals we’ve had no one can take from us.

I wish that everything on earth were just

As certain as the meals we’ve had. I wish

21

The meals we haven’t had were, anyway.

What have you you know where to lay your hands on?”

 

“The bread we bought in passing at the store.

There’s butter somewhere, too.”

 

“Let’s rend the bread.

I’ll light the fire for company for you;

You’ll not have any other company

Till Ed begins to get out on a Sunday

To look us over and give us his idea

Of what wants pruning, shingling, breaking up.

He’ll know what he would do if he were we,

And all at once. He’ll plan for us and plan

To help us, but he’ll take it out in planning.

Well, you can set the table with the loaf.

Let’s see you find your loaf. I’ll light the fire.

I like chairs occupying other chairs

Not offering a lady––”

 

“There again, Joe!

You’re tired.

 

“I’m drunk-nonsensical tired out;

Don’t mind a word I say. It’s a day’s work

To empty one house of all household goods

And fill another with ’em fifteen miles away,

Although you do no more than dump them down.”

 

“Dumped down in paradise we are and happy.”

 

“It’s all so much what I have always wanted,

I can’t believe it’s what you wanted, too.”

 

“Shouldn’t you like to know?”

 

22

“I’d like to know

If it is what you wanted, then how much

You wanted it for me.”

 

“A troubled conscience!

You don’t want me to tell if I don’t know.”

 

“I don’t want to find out what can’t be known.

 

But who first said the word to come?”

 

“My dear,

It’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe,

For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings.

Ends and beginnings––there are no such things.

There are only middles.”

 

“What is this?”

“This life?

Our sitting here by lantern-light together

Amid the wreckage of a former home?

You won’t deny the lantern isn’t new.

The stove is not, and you are not to me,

Nor I to you.”

 

“Perhaps you never were?”

 

“It would take me forever to recite

All that’s not new in where we find ourselves.

New is a word for fools in towns who think

Style upon style in dress and thought at last

Must get somewhere. I’ve heard you say as much.

No, this is no beginning.”

 

“Then an end?”

23

“End is a gloomy word.”

 

“Is it too late

To drag you out for just a good-night call

On the old peach trees on the knoll to grope

By starlight in the grass for a last peach

The neighbors may not have taken as their right

When the house wasn’t lived in? I’ve been looking:

I doubt if they have left us many grapes.

Before we set ourselves to right the house,

The first thing in the morning, out we go

To go the round of apple, cherry, peach,

Pine, alder, pasture, mowing, well, and brook.

All of a farm it is.”

 

“I know this much:

I’m going to put you in your bed, if first

I have to make you build it. Come, the light.”

 

When there was no more lantern in the kitchen,

The fire got out through crannies in the stove

And danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling,

As much at home as if they’d always danced there.

24 THE TELEPHONE

“When I was just as far as I could walk

From here to-day,

There was an hour

All still

When leaning with my head against a flower

I heard you talk.

Don’t say I didn’t, for I heard you say––

You spoke from that flower on the window sill––

Do you remember what it was you said?”

 

“First tell me what it was you thought you heard.”

 

“Having found the flower and driven a bee away,

I leaned my head,

And holding by the stalk,

I listened and I thought I caught the word––

What was it? Did you call me by my name?

Or did you say––

Someone said ‘Come’––I heard it as I bowed.”

 

“I may have thought as much, but not aloud.”

 

“Well, so I came.”

25 MEETING AND PASSING

As I went down the hill along the wall

There was a gate I had leaned at for the view

And had just turned from when I first saw you

As you came up the hill. We met. But all

We did that day was mingle great and small

Footprints in summer dust as if we drew

The figure of our being less than two

But more than one as yet. Your parasol

 

Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.

And all the time we talked you seemed to see

Something down there to smile at in the dust.

(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)

Afterward I went past what you had passed

Before we met and you what I had passed.

26 HYLA BROOK

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)––

Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat––

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

We love the things we love for what they are.

27 THE OVEN BIRD

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

28 BOND AND FREE

Love has earth to which she clings

With hills and circling arms about––

Wall within wall to shut fear out.

But Thought has need of no such things,

For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

 

On snow and sand and turf, I see

Where Love has left a printed trace

With straining in the world’s embrace.

And such is Love and glad to be.

But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

 

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom

And sits in Sirius’ disc all night,

Till day makes him retrace his flight,

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