The page he contemplates he doesn’t see.
The lesson, the long lesson, has been summer.
His mind holds summer, as his skin holds sun.
For once the homework, all of it, was done.
What were the crops, where were the fiery fields
Where for so many days so many hours
The sun assaulted him with glittering showers.
Expect a certain absence in his presence.
Expect all winter long a summer scholar,
For scarcely all its snows can cool that color.
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as possible miss it,Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,Over the tree and the long sweet…
Are vegetable hearts) were worn on sleeves,The squash’s are. In green the squash vine gushes.The flowers are cornucopias of summer,Briefly exuberant and cheaply golden.And if they make a show of being hidden,Are open promiscuously to every comer.Let the squash be what it was doomed to beBy the old Gardener with the shrewd green thumb.Let it…
But once upon a timeThere were three old women.One wore a small beardAnd carried a big umbrella.One stood in the middleOf the road hailing cars.One drove an old cartAll over the town collecting junk.They were not weird sisters,No relation to one another.A duly accredited witch INever heard Amherst ever hadBut as I say thereWere these…
Indoors the constant fire, the careful thriftAre facts that I accept and understand.I have brought in red berries and green boughs-Berries of black alder, boughs of pine.They and the sunlight on them, both are mine.I need no florist flowers in my house.Having lived here the years that are my best,I call it home. I am…
Weather has stained the shingles darkAnd indistinguishable from bark.Lichen that long ago adjournedIts lodging here has now returned.And if you look in through the doorYou see a sapling through the floor.
(Hal for short) boy with wind-wild hair.It means Praise God, as well it should since praiseIs what God’s for. Why didn’t they call my fatherHallelujah instead of Ebenezer?Eben, of course, but christened Ebenezer,Product of Nova Scotia (hallelujah).Daniel, a country doctor, was his fatherAnd my father his tenth and final boy.A baby and last, he had…
