#for robert frost

[ryannormancyr]

and smiles to go before i sleep, and smiles to go before i sleep

[radiofreeblog]

"For Robert Frost"

1.

Why do you talk so much Robert Frost? One day I drove up to Ripton to ask,

I stayed the whole day And never got the chance To put the question.

I drove off at dusk Worn out and aching In both ears. Robert Frost,

Were you shy as a boy? Do you go on making up For some long period of solitude?

Is it that talk Doesn’t have to be metered and rhymed? Or is talk distracting from something worse?

2.

I saw you once on the TV, Unsteady at the lectern, The flimsy white leaf Of hair standing straight up In the wind, among top hats, Old farmer and son Of worse winters than this, Stopped in that first dazzle

Of the District of Columbia, Suddenly having to pay For the cheap onionskin, The worn-out ribbon, the eyes Wrecked from writing poems For us — stopped, Lonely before millions, The paper jumping in your grip,

And as the Presidents Also on the platform Began flashing nervously Their Presidential smiles For the harmless old guy, And poets watching on the TV Stated thinking, Well that’s The end of that tradition,

And the managers of the event Said, Boys this is it, This sonofabitch poet Is gonna croak, Putting the paper aside You drew forth From your great faithful heart The poem.

3.

Once, walking in winter in Vermont, In the snow, I followed a set of footprints That aimed for the woods. At the verge I could make out, “far in the pillared dark,” An old creature in a huge, clumsy overcoat, Lifting his great boots through the drifts, Going as if to die among “those dark trees” Of his own country. I watched him go,

Past a house, quiet, warm and light, A farm, a countryside, a woodpile in its slow Smokeless burning, alder swamps ghastly white, Tumultuous snows, blanker whiteness, Into the pathless wood, one eye weeping, The dark trees, for which no saying is dark enough, Which mask the gloom and lead on into it, The bare, the withered, the deserted.

There were no more cottages. Soft bombs of dust falling from the boughs, The sun shining no warmer than the moon, He had outwalked the farthest city light, And there, clinging to the perfect trees, A last leaf. What was it? What was that whiteness? — white, uncertain — The night too dark to know.

4.

He turned. Love, Love of things, duty, he said, And made his way back to the shelter No longer sheltering him, the house Where everything turned into words,

Where he would think on the white wave, Folded back, that rides in place on the obscure Pouring of this life to the sea — And seal the broken lips Of darkness with the mot juste.

5.

Poet of the country of white houses, Of clearings going out to the dark wall of woods Frayed along the skyline, you who nearly foreknew The next lines of poems you suddenly left off writing, Who dwelt in access to that which other men Have burned all their lives to get near, who heard The high wind, in gusts, seething From far off, coming through the trees exactly To this place where it must happen, who spent Your life on the point of giving yourself away To the dark trees, the dissolving woods, Into which you go at last, heart in hand, deep in:

When we think of a man who was cursed Neither with the all-lovingness of Walt Whitman Nor with Melville’s anguish to know and to suffer, And yet cursed . . . A man, what shall I say, Vain, not fully convinced he was dying, whose calling Was to set up in the wilderness of his country, At whatever cost, a man who would be his own man, We think of you. And from the same doorway At which you lived, between the house and the woods, We see your old footprints going away across The great Republic, Frost, up memorized slopes, Down hills floating by heart on the bulldozed land.

- Galway Kinnell