So here the great man stood,fermenting malice and poemswe have to be nearly as fierceagainst ourselves as henot to misread by their disguises.
Blue in dawn haze, the tamarackacross the road is new since Frostand thirty feet tall already.
No doubt he liked to scorch offmorning fog by simply staring through itlong enough so that what he sawgrew visible. "Watching the dragoncome out of the Notch," his childrenused to call it.
And no wonderhe chose a climate whose winterand house whose isolation could bestern enough to his wrath and pityas to make them seem survival skillshe'd learned on the job, farmingfifty acres of pasture and woods.
For cash crops he had sweat and doubtand moralizing rage, those staplesof the barter system.
And these swiftand aching summers, like the blackberriesI've been poaching down the roadfrom the house where no one's home —acid at first and each little globeof the berry too taut and distinctfrom the others, then they swell to holdthe riot of their juices and brieflythe fat berries are perfected to my taste,and then they begin to leak and bloband under their crescendo of sugarI can taste how they make it through winter. . . .
By the time I'm back from a last,six-berry raid, it's almost dusk,and more and more mosquitoswill race around my ear their tiny engines,the speedboats of the insect world.
I won't be longer on the porchthan it takes to look out onceand see what I've taught myselfin two months here to discern:night restoring its opacities,though for an instant as intenseand evanescent as waking from a dreamof eating blackberries and almostbeing able to remember it,
I thinkI see the parts — haze, dusk, lightbroken into grains, fatigue,the mineral dark of the White Mountains,the wavering shadows steadying themselves —separate, then joined, then seamless:the way, in fact,
Frost's great poems,like all great poems, concealwhat they merely know, to bepredicaments.
However longit took to watch what I thoughtI saw, it was dark when I was done,everywhere and on the porch,and since nothing stoppedmy sight,
I let it go.
Anonymous submission.
