Samuel is forever talking of his elm—
But I did not need to die to learn about roots:
I, who dug all the ditches about Spoon River.
Look at my elm!
Sprung from as good a seed as his,
Sown at the same time,
It is dying at the top:
Not from lack of life, nor fungus,
Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks.
Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock,
And can no further spread.
And all the while the top of the tree
Is tiring itself out, and dying,
Trying to grow.
The bridge says : Come across, try me ; see how good
I am.
The big rock in the river says: Look at me; learn
how to stand up.
The white water says: I go on; around, under, over,
I go on.
A kneeling, scraggly pine says: I am here yet; they
nearly got me last year.
A sliver of moon slides by on a high wind calling: I
know why; I'll see you to-morrow; I'll tell you
everything to-morrow.
The sea rocks have a green moss.
The pine rocks have red berries.
I have memories of you.
Speak to me of how you miss me.
Tell me the hours go long and slow.
Speak to me of the drag on your heart,
The iron drag of the long days.
I know hours empty as a beggar's tin cup on a rainy day, empty as a soldier's sleeve with an arm lost.
Speak to me . . .
I watched the men at work on the stubborn rock,
But mostly the one man poised on a drill
Above the steam that hissed and billowed about him
White in the frosty air,
Where the lordly house would stand.
Majestic, muscular, high like a god,
He stood,
And controlled and stopped
And started his thundering drill,
Offhand and careless and lordly as Thor,
Begrimed and solemn and crowned with sweat,
Where the great steel chains swung over the buckets of rock.
Then out of a nearby house came a youth,
All gloved and encased in fur and touched with content,
Thin-shouldered and frail and finished,
Leading a house-dog out on a silver chain.
The chatter of little people
Breaks on my purpose
Like the water-drops which slowly wear the rocks to powder.
And while I laugh
My spirit crumbles at their teasing touch.
Like an advent'rous seafarer am I,
Who hath some long and dang'rous voyage been,
And, call'd to tell of his discovery,
How far he sail'd, what countries he had seen;
Proceeding from the port whence he put forth,
Shows by his compass how his course he steer'd,
When East, when West, when South, and when by North,
As how the Pole to every place was rear'd,
What capes he doubled, of what Continent,
The gulfs and straits that strangely he had past,
Where most becalm'd, where with foul weather spent,
And on what rocks in peril to be cast:
Thus in my love, Time calls me to relate
My tedious travels and oft-varying fate.
A region desolate and wild.
Black, chafing water: and afloat,
And lonely as a truant child
In a waste wood, a single boat:
No mast, no sails are set thereon;
It moves, but never moveth on:
And welters like a human thing
Amid the wild waves weltering.
Behind, a buried vale doth sleep,
Far down the torrent cleaves its way:
In front the dumb rock rises steep,
A fretted wall of blue and grey;
Of shooting cliff and crumbled stone
With many a wild weed overgrown:
All else, black water: and afloat,
One rood from shore, that single boat.