Mountain Interval Part 2

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?"

"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 gra.s.s 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.

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."

MEETING AND Pa.s.sING

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 pa.s.sed Before we met and you what I had pa.s.sed.

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.

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.

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, With smell of burning on every plume, Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.

Yet some say Love by being thrall And simply staying possesses all In several beauty that Thought fares far To find fused in another star.

BIRCHES

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.