10. Place for a Third   
   
(From Harper’s Magazine, July 1920.)   
   
   
NOTHING to say to all those marriages!      
She had made three herself to three of his.      
The score was even for them, three to three.      
But come to die she found she cared so much:      
She thought of children in a burial row;           5   
Three children in a burial row were sad.      
One man’s three women in a burial row      
Somehow made her impatient with the man.      
And so she said to Laban, “You have done      
A good deal right; don’t do the last thing wrong.           10   
Don’t make me lie with those two other women.”      
   
Laban said, No, he would not make her lie      
With anyone but that she had a mind to,      
If that was how she felt, of course, he said.      
She went her way. But Laban having caught           15   
This glimpse of lingering person in Eliza,      
And anxious to make all he could of it      
With something he remembered in himself,      
Tried to think how he could exceed his promise,      
And give good measure to the dead, though thankless.           20   
If that was how she felt, he kept repeating.      
His first thought under pressure was a grave      
In a new boughten grave plot by herself,      
Under he didn’t care how great a stone:      
He’d sell a yoke of steers to pay for it.           25   
And weren’t there special cemetery flowers,      
That, once grief sets to growing, grief may rest;      
The flowers will go on with grief awhile,      
And no one seem neglecting or neglected?      
A prudent grief will not despise such aids.           30   
He thought of evergreen and everlasting.      
And then he had a thought worth many of these.      
Somewhere must be the grave of the young boy      
Who married her for playmate more than helpmate,      
And sometimes laughed at what it was between them.           35   
How would she like to sleep her last with him?      
Where was his grave? Did Laban know his name?      
   
He found the grave a town or two away,      
The headstone cut with John, Beloved Husband,      
Beside it room reserved; the say a sister’s;           40   
A never-married sister’s of that husband,      
Whether Eliza would be welcome there.      
The dead was bound to silence: ask the sister.      
So Laban saw the sister, and, saying nothing      
Of where Eliza wanted not to lie,           45   
And who had thought to lay her with her first love,      
Begged simply for the grave. The sister’s face      
Fell all in wrinkles of responsibility.      
She wanted to do right. She’d have to think.      
Laban was old and poor, yet seemed to care;           50   
And she was old and poor—but she cared, too.      
They sat. She cast one dull, old look at him,      
Then turned him out to go on other errands      
She said he might attend to in the village,      
While she made up her mind how much she cared—           55   
And how much Laban cared—and why he cared,      
(She made shrewd eyes to see where he came in.)      
   
She’d looked Eliza up her second time,      
A widow at her second husband’s grave,      
And offered her a home to rest awhile           60   
Before she went the poor man’s widow’s way,      
Housekeeping for the next man out of wedlock.      
She and Eliza had been friends through all.      
Who was she to judge marriage in a world      
Whose Bible’s so confused up in marriage counsel?           65   
The sister had not come across this Laban;      
A decent product of life’s ironing-out;      
She must not keep him waiting. Time would press      
Between the death day and the funeral day.      
So when she saw him coming in the street           70   
She hurried her decision to be ready      
To meet him with his answer at the door.      
Laban had known about what it would be      
From the way she had set her poor old mouth,      
To do, as she had put it, what was right.           75   
   
She gave it through the screen door closed between them:      
“No, not with John. There wouldn’t be no sense.      
Eliza’s had too many other men.”      
   
Laban was forced to fall back on his plan      
To buy Eliza a plot to lie alone in:           80   
Which gives him for himself a choice of lots      
When his time comes to die and settle down.      

11. Plowmen   
    
(From A Miscellany of American Poetry 1920 [New York, 1920].)   
    
    
I HEAR men say to plow the snow.      
They cannot mean to plant it, though—      
Unless in bitterness to mock      
At having cultivated rock.      
 

12. The Runaway   
   
(From The Amherst Monthly, June 1918.)   
   
   
ONCE when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,      
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, “Whose colt?”      
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,      
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head      
And snorted to us. And then we saw him bolt.           5   
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,      
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray,      
Like a shadow across instead of behind the flakes.      
The little fellow’s afraid of the falling snow.      
He never saw it before. It isn’t play           10   
With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.      
He wouldn’t believe when his mother told him, ‘Sakes,      
It’s only weather.’ He thought she didn’t know!      
So this is something he has to bear alone      
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone,           15   
He mounts the wall again with whited eyes      
Dilated nostrils, and tail held straight up straight.      
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.      
“Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,      
When all other creatures have gone to stall and bin,           20   
Ought to be told to come and take him in.”      

13. To E.T.   
   
(From The Yale Review, April 1920.)   
   
   
I SLUMBERED with your poems on my breast      
Spread open as I dropped them half-read through      
Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb      
To see, if in a dream they brought of you,      
   
I might not have the chance I missed in life           5   
Through some delay, and call you to your face      
First soldier, and then poet, and then both,      
Who died a soldier-poet of your race.      
   
I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain      
Unsaid between us, brother, and this remained—           10   
And one thing more that was not then to say:      
The Victory for what it lost and gained.      
   
You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire      
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day      
The war seemed over more for you than me,           15   
But now for me than you—the other way.      
   
How over, though, for even me who knew      
The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine,      
If I was not to speak of it to you      
And see you please once more with words of mine?           20   

14. The Valley’s Singing Day   
   
(From Harper’s Magazine, December 1920.)   
   
   
THE SOUND of the closing outside door was all.      
You made no sound in the grass with your footfall,      
As far as you went from the door, which was not far;      
But you had awakened under the morning star      
The first song-bird that awakened all the rest.           5   
He could have slept but a moment more at best.      
Already determined dawn began to lay      
In place across a cloud the slender ray      
For prying beneath and forcing the lids of sight,      
And loosing the pent-up music of over-night.           10   
But dawn was not to begin their “pearly-pearly”      
(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early,      
Before it changes to diamonds in the sun),      
Neither was song that day to be self-begun.      
You had begun it, and if there needed proof—           15   
I was asleep still under the dripping roof,      
My window curtain hung over the sill to wet;      
But I should awake to confirm your story yet;      
I should be willing to say and help you say      
That once you had opened the valley’s singing day.           20

15. Wild Grapes   
   
(From Harper’s Magazine, December 1920.)   
   
   
WHAT tree may not the fig be gathered from?      
The grape may not be gathered from the birch?      
It’s all you know the grape, or know the birch.      
As a girl gathered from the birch myself      
Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn,           5   
I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.      
I was born, I suppose, like anyone,      
And grew to be a little boyish girl      
My brother could not always leave at home.      
But that beginning was wiped out in fear           10   
The day I swung suspended with the grapes,      
And was come after like Eurydice      
And brought down safely from the upper regions;      
And the life I live now’s an extra life      
I can waste as I please on whom I please.           15   
So if you see me celebrate two birthdays,      
And give myself out of two different ages,      
One of them five years younger than I look—      
   
One day my brother led me to a glade      
Where a white birch he knew of stood alone,           20   
Wearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves,      
And heavy on her heavy hair behind,      
Against her neck, an ornament of grapes.      
Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year.      
One bunch of them, and there began to be           25   
Bunches all round me growing in white birches,      
The way they grew round Leif the Lucky’s German;      
Mostly as much beyond my lifted hands, though,      
As the moon used to seem when I was younger,      
And only freely to be had for climbing.           30   
My brother did the climbing; and at first      
Threw me down grapes to miss and scatter      
And have to hunt for in sweet fern and hardhack;      
Which gave him some time to himself to eat,      
But not so much, perhaps, as a boy needed.           35   
So then, to make me wholly self-supporting,      
He climbed still higher and bent the tree to earth      
And put it in my hands to pick my own grapes.      
“Here, take a tree-top, I’ll get down another.      
Hold on with all your might when I let go.”           40   
I said I had the tree. It wasn’t true.      
The opposite was true. The tree had me.      
The minute it was left with me alone      
It caught me up as if I were the fish      
And it the fishpole. So I was translated           45   
To loud cries from my brother of “Let go!      
Don’t you know anything, you girl? Let go!”      
But I, with something of the baby grip      
Acquired ancestrally in just such trees      
When wilder mothers than our wildest now           50   
Hung babies out on branches by the hands      
To dry or wash or tan, I don’t know which,      
(You’ll have to ask an evolutionist)—      
I held on uncomplainingly for life.      
My brother tried to make me laugh to help me.           55   
“What are you doing up there in those grapes?      
Don’t be afraid. A few of them won’t hurt you.      
I mean, they won’t pick you if you don’t them.”      
Much danger of my picking anything!      
By that time I was pretty well reduced           60   
To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang.      
“Now you know how it feels,” my brother said,      
“To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call them,      
That when it thinks it has escaped the fox      
By growing where it shouldn’t—on a birch,           65   
Where a fox wouldn’t think to look for it—      
And if he looked and found it, couldn’t reach it—      
Just then come you and I to gather it.      
Only you have the advantage of the grapes      
In one way: you have one more stem to cling by,           70   
And promise more resistance to the picker.”      
   
One by one I lost off my hat and shoes,      
And still I clung. I let my head fall back,      
And shut my eyes against the sun, my ears      
Against my brother’s nonsense; “Drop,” he said,           75   
“I’ll catch you in my arms. It isn’t far.”      
(Stated in lengths of him it might not be.)      
“Drop or I’ll shake the tree and shake you down.”      
Grim silence on my part as I sank lower,      
My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings.           80   
“Why, if she isn’t serious about it!      
Hold tight awhile till I think what to do.      
I’ll bend the tree down and let you down by it.”      
I don’t know much about the letting down;      
But once I felt ground with my stocking feet           85   
And the world came revolving back to me,      
I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers,      
Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off.      
My brother said: “Don’t you weigh anything?      
Try to weigh something next time, so you won’t           90   
Be run off with by birch trees into space.”      
   
It wasn’t my not weighing anything      
So much as my not knowing anything—      
My brother had been nearer right before.      
I had not taken the first step in knowledge;           95   
I had not learned to let go with the hands,      
As still I have not learned to with the heart,      
And have no wish to with the heart—nor need,      
That I can see. The mind—is not the heart.      
I may yet live, as I know others live,           100   
To wish in vain to let go with the mind—      
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me      
That I need learn to let go with the heart.