The old woman sits on a bench before the door and
With her meagre pale demoralized daughter.
Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the
And saying that when she was first
She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.(It is empty now, the roof has
But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the
Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing;
The place is now more solitary than ever before.)"When I was nursing my second
My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a
And brought it;
I put its mouth to the
Rather than let it starve,
I had milk enough for three babies.
Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,
Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.
I had more joy from that than from the others."Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad
With market-wagons, mean cares and decay.
She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry
Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows,
I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,
The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.
