Family And People Poetry

• The Witch of Coos
  

  I staid the night for shelter at a farm
  Behind the mountains, with a mother and son,
  Two old-believers. They did all the talking.

  MOTHER Folks think a witch who has familiar spirits
  She could call up to pass a winter evening,
  But won't, should be burned at the stake or something.
  Summoning spirits isn't 'Button, button,
  Who's got the button,' I would have them know.

  SON: Mother can make a common table rear
  And kick with two legs like an army mule.

  MOTHER: And when I've done it, what good have I
  done?
  Rather than tip a table for you, let me
  Tell you what Ralle the Sioux Control once told me.
  He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him
  How could that be -- I thought the dead were souls,
  He broke my trance. Don't that make you suspicious
  That there's something the dead are keeping back?
  Yes, there's something the dead are keeping back.

  SON: You wouldn't want to tell him what we have
  Up attic, mother?

  MOTHER: Bones -- a skeleton.

  SON: But the headboard of mother's bed is pushed
  Against the' attic door: the door is nailed.
  It's harmless. Mother hears it in the night
  Halting perplexed behind the barrier
  Of door and headboard. Where it wants to get
  Is back into the cellar where it came from.

  MOTHER: We'll never let them, will we, son! We'll
  never !

  SON: It left the cellar forty years ago
  And carried itself like a pile of dishes
  Up one flight from the cellar to the kitchen,
  Another from the kitchen to the bedroom,
  Another from the bedroom to the attic,
  Right past both father and mother, and neither stopped
  it.
  Father had gone upstairs; mother was downstairs.
  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 favour.'
  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.
  So suddenly I flung the door wide on him.
  A moment he stood balancing with emotion,
  And all but lost himself. (A tongue of fire
  Flashed out and licked along his upper teeth.
  Smoke rolled inside the sockets of his eyes.)
  Then he came at me with one hand outstretched,
  The way he did in life once; but this time
  I struck the hand off brittle on the floor,
  And fell back from him on the floor myself.
  The finger-pieces slid in all directions.
  (Where did I see one of those pieces lately?
  Hand me my button-box- it must be there.)
  I sat up on the floor and shouted, 'Toffile,
  It's coming up to you.' It had its choice
  Of the door to the cellar or the hall.
  It took the hall door for the novelty,
  And set off briskly for so slow a thing,
  Stillgoing every which way in the joints, though,
  So that it looked like lightning or a scribble,
  >From the slap I had just now given its hand.
  I listened till it almost climbed the stairs
  >From the hall to the only finished bedroom,
  Before I got up to do anything;
  Then ran and shouted, 'Shut the bedroom door,
  Toffile, for my sake!' 'Company?' he said,
  'Don't make me get up; I'm too warm in bed.'
  So lying forward weakly on the handrail
  I pushed myself upstairs, and in the light
  (The kitchen had been dark) I had to own
  I could see nothing. 'Toffile, I don't see it.
  It's with us in the room though. It's the bones.'
  'What bones?' 'The cellar bones- out of the grave.'
  That made him throw his bare legs out of bed
  And sit up by me and take hold of me.
  I wanted to put out the light and see
  If I could see it, or else mow the room,
  With our arms at the level of our knees,
  And bring the chalk-pile down. 'I'll tell you what-
  It's looking for another door to try.
  The uncommonly deep snow has made him think
  Of his old song, The Wild Colonial Boy,
  He always used to sing along the tote-road.
  He's after an open door to get out-doors.
  Let's trap him with an open door up attic.'
  Toffile agreed to that, and sure enough,
  Almost the moment he was given an opening,
  The steps began to climb the attic stairs.
  I heard them. Toffile didn't seem to hear them.
  'Quick !' I slammed to the door and held the knob.
  'Toffile, get nails.' I made him nail the door shut,
  And push the headboard of the bed against it.
  Then we asked was there anything
  Up attic that we'd ever want again.
  The attic was less to us than the cellar.
  If the bones liked the attic, let them have it.
  Let them stay in the attic. When they sometimes
  Come down the stairs at night and stand perplexed
  Behind the door and headboard of the bed,
  Brushing their chalky skull with chalky fingers,
  With sounds like the dry rattling of a shutter,
  That's what I sit up in the dark to say-
  To no one any more since Toffile died.
  2o3 Let them stay in the attic since they went there.
  I promised Toffile to be cruel to them
  For helping them be cruel once to him.

  SON: We think they had a grave down in the cellar.

  MOTHER: We know they had a grave down in the cellar.

  SON: We never could find out whose bones they were.

  MOTHER: Yes, we could too, son. Tell the truth for once.
  They were a man's his father killed for me.
  I mean a man he killed instead of me.
  The least I could do was to help dig their grave.
  We were about it one night in the cellar.
  Son knows the story: but 'twas not for him
  To tell the truth, suppose the time had come.
  Son looks surprised to see me end a lie
  We'd kept all these years between ourselves
  So as to have it ready for outsiders.
  But to-night I don't care enough to lie-
  I don't remember why I ever cared.
  Toffile, if he were here, I don't believe
  Could tell you why he ever cared himself-

  She hadn't found the finger-bone she wanted
  Among the buttons poured out in her lap.
  I verified the name next morning: Toffile.
  The rural letter-box said Toffile Lajway.

  
  In Family And People - 114 days ago
• The Hill Wife
  

  LONELINESS
  (Her Word)

  One ought not to have to care
  So much as you and I
  Care when the birds come round the house
  To seem to say good-bye;
  Or care so much when they come back
  With whatever it is they sing;
  The truth being we are as much
  Too glad for the one thing
  As we are too sad for the other here --
  With birds that fill their breasts
  But with each other and themselves
  And their built or driven nests.
  HOUSE FEAR
  Always -- I tell you this they learned--
  Always at night when they returned
  To the lonely house from far away
  To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
  They learned to rattle the lock and key
  To give whatever might chance to be
  Warning and time to be off in flight:
  And preferring the out- to the in-door night,
  They. learned to leave the house-door wide
  Until they had lit the lamp inside.
  THE SMILE
  (Her Word)
  I didn't like the way he went away.
  That smile! It never came of being gay.
  Still he smiled- did you see him?- I was sure!
  Perhaps because we gave him only bread
  And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
  Perhaps because he let us give instead
  Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
  Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,
  Or being very young (and he was pleased
  To have a vision of us old and dead).
  I wonder how far down the road he's got.
  He's watching from the woods as like as not.
  THE OFT-REPEATED DREAM
  She had no saying dark enough
  For the dark pine that kept
  Forever trying the window-latch
  Of the room where they slept.
  The tireless but ineffectual hands
  That with every futile pass
  Made the great tree seem as a little bird
  Before the mystery of glass!
  It never had been inside the room,
  And only one of the two
  Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream
  Of what the tree might do.
  THE IMPULSE
  It was too lonely for her there,
  And too wild,
  And since there were but two of them,
  And no child,
  And work was little in the house,
  She was free,
  And followed where he furrowed field,
  Or felled tree.
  She rested on a log and tossed
  The fresh chips,
  With a song only to herself
  On her lips.
  And once she went to break a bough
  Of black alder.
  She strayed so far she scarcely heard.
  When he called her--
  And didn't answer -- didn't speak --
  Or return.
  She stood, and then she ran and hid
  In the fern.
  He never found her, though he looked
  Everywhere,
  And he asked at her mother's house
  Was she there.
  Sudden and swift and light as that
  The ties gave,
  And he learned of finalities
  Besides the grave.

  
  In Family And People - 114 days ago
• An Old Man's Winter Night
  All out of doors looked darkly in at him
  Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
  That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
  What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
  Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
  What kept him from remembering what it was
  That brought him to that creaking room was age.
  He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
  And having scared the cellar under him
  In clomping there, he scared it once again
  In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
  Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
  Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
  But nothing so like beating on a box.
  A light he was to no one but himself
  Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
  A quiet light, and then not even that.
  He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
  So late-arising, to the broken moon
  As better than the sun in any case
  For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
  His icicles along the wall to keep;
  And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
  Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
  And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
  One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
  A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
  It's thus he does it of a winter night.
  In Family And People - 115 days ago
• A Soldier
  He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,
  That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,
  But still lies pointed as it ploughed the dust.
  If we who sight along it round the world,
  See nothing worthy to have been its mark,
  It is because like men we look too near,
  Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,
  Our missiles always make too short an arc.
  They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect
  The curve of earth, and striking, break their own;
  They make us cringe for metal-point on stone.
  But this we know, the obstacle that checked
  And tripped the body, shot the spirit on
  Further than target ever showed or shone.
  In Family And People - 115 days ago