New Hampshire

I met a traveller from Arkansas Who boasted of his state as beautiful For diamonds and apples. “Diamonds And apples in commercial quantities?” I asked him, on my guard. “Oh yes,” he answered, Off his. The time was evening in the Pullman. “I see the porter’s made your bed,” I told him.

I met a Californian who would Talk California⁠—a state so blessed, He said, in climate none had ever died there A natural death, and Vigilance Committees Had had to organize to stock the graveyards And vindicate the state’s humanity. “Just the way Steffanson runs on,” I murmured, “About the British Arctic. That’s what comes Of being in the market with a climate.”

I met a poet from another state, A zealot full of fluid inspiration, Who in the name of fluid inspiration, But in the best style of bad salesmanship, Angrily tried to make me write a protest (In verse I think) against the Volstead Act. He didn’t even offer me a drink Until I asked for one to steady him. This is called having an idea to sell.

It never could have happened in New Hampshire.

The only person really soiled with trade I ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire Was someone who had just come back ashamed From selling things in California. He’d built a noble mansard roof with balls On turrets like Constantinople, deep In woods some ten miles from a railroad station, As if to put forever out of mind The hope of being, as we say, received.

I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house Of one room and one window and one door, The only dwelling in a waste cut over A hundred square miles round it in the mountains: And that not dwelt in now by men or women (It never had been dwelt in, though, by women, So what is this I make a sorrow of?) I came as census-taker to the waste To count the people in it and found none, None in the hundred miles, none in the house, Where I came last with some hope, but not much After hours’ overlooking from the cliffs An emptiness flayed to the very stone. I found no people that dared show themselves, None not in hiding from the outward eye. The time was autumn, but how anyone Could tell the time of year when every tree That could have dropped a leaf was down itself And nothing but the stump of it was left Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch; And every tree up stood a rotting trunk Without a single leaf to spend on autumn, Or branch to whistle after what was spent. Perhaps the wind the more without the help Of breathing trees said something of the time Of year or day the way it swung a door Forever off the latch, as if rude men Passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him For the next one to open for himself.

I’ve known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted axe behind me. But that was in the woods, to hold my hand From striking at another alder’s roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch. This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day Behind me on the snow in my own yard Where I was working at the chopping-block, And cutting nothing not cut down already. He caught my axe expertly on the rise, When all my strength put forth was in his favor, Held it a moment where it was, to calm me, Then took it from me⁠—and I let him take it. I didn’t know him well enough to know What it was all about. There might be something He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor He might prefer to say to him disarmed. But all he had to tell me in French-English Was what he thought of⁠—not me, but my axe; Me only as I took my axe to heart. It was the bad axe-helve some one had sold me⁠— “Made on machine,” he said, ploughing the grain With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran Across the handle’s long drawn serpentine, Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. “You give her one good crack, she’s snap raght off. Den where’s your hax-ead flying t’rough de hair?” Admitted; and yet, what was that to him?

You know Paul could do wonders. Everyone’s Heard how he thrashed the horses on a load That wouldn’t budge until they simply stretched Their rawhide harness from the load to camp. Paul told the boss the load would be all right, “The sun will bring your load in”⁠—and it did⁠— By shrinking the rawhide to natural length. That’s what is called a stretcher. But I guess The one about his jumping so’s to land With both his feet at once against the ceiling, And then land safely right side up again, Back on the floor, is fact or pretty near fact. Well this is such a yarn. Paul sawed his wife Out of a white-pine log. Murphy was there, And, as you might say, saw the lady born. Paul worked at anything in lumbering. He’d been hard at it taking boards away For⁠—I forget⁠—the last ambitious sawyer To want to find out if he couldn’t pile The lumber on Paul till Paul begged for mercy. They’d sliced the first slab off a big butt log, And the sawyer had slammed the carriage back To slam end on again against the saw teeth. To judge them by the way they caught themselves When they saw what had happened to the log, They must have had a guilty expectation Something was going to go with their slambanging. Something had left a broad black streak of grease On the new wood the whole length of the log Except, perhaps, a foot at either end. But when Paul put his finger in the grease, It wasn’t grease at all, but a long slot.

I was a baby: I don’t know where I was.

Mother. The only fault my husband found with me⁠— I went to sleep before I went to bed, Especially in winter when the bed Might just as well be ice and the clothes snow. The night the bones came up the cellar-stairs Toffile had gone to bed alone and left me, But left an open door to cool the room off So as to sort of turn me out of it. I was just coming to myself enough To wonder where the cold was coming from, When I heard Toffile upstairs in the bedroom And thought I heard him downstairs in the cellar. The board we had laid down to walk dry-shod on When there was water in the cellar in spring Struck the hard cellar bottom. And then someone Began the stairs, two footsteps for each step, The way a man with one leg and a crutch, Or a little child, comes up. It wasn’t Toffile: It wasn’t anyone who could be there. The bulkhead double-doors were double-locked And swollen tight and buried under snow. The cellar windows were banked up with sawdust And swollen tight and buried under snow. It was the bones. I knew them⁠—and good reason. My first impulse was to get to the knob And hold the door. But the bones didn’t try The door; they halted helpless on the landing, Waiting for things to happen in their favor. The faintest restless rustling ran all through them. I never could have done the thing I did If the wish hadn’t been too strong in me To see how they were mounted for this walk. I had a vision of them put together Not like a man, but like a chandelier.