When I see birches bent to left and right across
the lines of straighter, darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging
them.
But swinging doesn't bend
them down to stay as ice storms do.
Often you must have seen them loaded with
ice a sunny winter morning after a rain.
They click upon themselves as the
breeze rises an d turn many -colored
as the stir cracks and crazes
their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells,
shattering and avalanching on the
snow crust.
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away,
you'd think the inner dome of
heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by
the load, and they seem
not to break.
Though once they are bowed so low for long,
they never right themselves.
You may see their trunks arching in the woods years afterward,
trailing their leaves on
the ground like girls on hands and knees that throw
their hair before them over their heads
to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say,
when truth broke in with all her matter of
fact about the ice storm, I should prefer to have
had some boy bend them as he went
out or in to fetch the cows,
some boy too far from town to learn baseball, whose only
play was what he found himself summer or
winter and could play alone.
One by one he subdued
his father's trees by riding them down
over and over again until he took the stiffness
out of them and not one but hung limp,
not one was left for him to conquer.
He learned
all there was to learn about not launching out
too soon and so not carrying the tree
away clear to the ground.
He always kept his poise to the top branches,
climbing carefully,
with the same pains you used to fill a cup up to
the brim and even above the brim.
Then
he flung outward, feet first with a swish,
kicking his way down through the air to the
ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches,
and so I dream of going back to be.
It's
when I'm weary of considerations and life is too much
like a pathless wood where your
face burns and tickles with the cobwebs broken
across it and one eye is weeping from the
twigs having lashed across it open. I'd like to get
away from earth a while and then
come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand
me and half grant
what I wish and snatch me away not to return earth's
the right place for love. I don't
know where it's likely to go better. I'd like to go by
climbing a birch tree and climb
black branches up a snow -white trunk toward
heaven till the tree could bear no more but
dipped its top and set me down
again.
That would be good both going
and coming back.
that one could do worse than
be a swinger of virtues.