Back to the pasture that they found too green,
Broken of every knowledge but the last
Knowledge of how escape is not a door
But a slow-winding road whose hundred coils
Return upon each other, soon or late
—And how and when and under what cold stars
The old wound bleeds beneath the armored mind.
And yet, this journey is not desolate
Nor am I desolate in it, as we crawl
Slowly from little town to little town
Always against the sun, and the horse nods,
And there’s my daughter talking, and her child
Sleeping or waking, and we stop awhile
And then go on awhile, and I can feel
The slow sun creeping through me summerlong.
Until, at times, I fall into a doze
Awake, a daydream without apparitions
And, falling so, inhabit for a space
A second childhood, calmer than the first,
But wise in the same fashion, and so touch
For a long, drowsy hour of afternoon,
The ripened thing, the autumn at the heart,
The one full star of evening that is age.
Yes, I must be a second child sometimes,
For as we pass and as they watch us pass,
It seems to me their eyes make stories of us
And I can hear those stories murmuring
Like pigeons in a loft when I’m asleep,
Till sometimes I must wonder for a while
If I’ve not changed myself for someone else
Or grown a story without knowing it,
And, with no intermediary death,
Stepped out of flesh and taken on a ghost.
For at such times, it almost seems to me
As if I were no longer what I am
But the deluded shade of Peter Rugg
Still looking for his Boston through the storm,
Or the strange spook of Johnny Appleseed,
Crept out of heaven on a windless night
To see if his wild orchards prosper still
And leave a heap of Baldwins and sweet russets
—Moonglittered, scrubbed with rags of silver cloud
And Indian magic—by the lucky doors
Of such good people as take care of them—
While for my daughter, though I know she’s real,
She and her story, yet, in the waking dream
She mixes with that song I used to know
About the Spanish lady of old days
Who loved the Englishman and sought for him
All through green England in her scarlet shoes,
Knowing no word of English but his name.
I hear her voice, where the guitar is mixed
With the sweet, jangling mule-bells of Castile,
I see her face under its high shell-comb—
And then it is my daughter’s—and I wake
—And yet know, even in waking, that we are
Somewhere between a story and a dream.
And so, you see, I find a kind of peace
In this last foray, will not rail at the sun,
Eat, drink and sleep, in spite of what is past,
Talk with my daughter, watch the turning skies.
The Spanish lady found her Englishman.
Well, we may find this boy I’ve half-forgot,
Although our story is another story.
So life works in us for a little while
And then the ferment’s quiet. So we do
Wrongs much beyond intent, and suffer them.
So we go looking for the wilderness-stone.
I shall smell lilac in Connecticut
No doubt, before I die, and see the clean
White, reticent, small churches of my youth,
The gardens full of phlox and mignonette,
The pasture-bars I broke to run away.
It was my thought to lie in an uncropped
And savage field no plough had ever scored,
Between a bee-tree and a cast deer-horn.
It was my thought to lie beside a stream
Too secret for the very deer to find,
Too solitary for remembrance.
It was a dream. It does not matter now.
Bury me where the soldiers of retreat
Are buried, underneath the faded star,
Bury me where the courtiers of escape
Fall down, confronted with their earth again.
Bury me where the fences hold the land
And the sun sinks beyond the pasture-bars
Never to fall upon the wilderness-stone.
And yet I have escaped, in spite of all.”
Lucy Weatherby smoothed out clothes in a trunk
With a stab at her heart. The trunk was packed to the lid.
There wasn’t an empty corner anywhere,
Pack as she would—but the blue dress wouldn’t go in.
Of course she’d be getting a lot of new dresses soon
And the blue was old—but she couldn’t leave it behind.
If only Henry wasn’t so selfish, at times!
But Henry was like all brothers and like all men,
Expecting a lady to travel to Canada
With just one trunk and the boxes! It was too bad.
He had a trunk of his own for razors and shirts,
And yet she couldn’t take two—and there were the hoops;
He kept on fussing because she wouldn’t leave them
When she knew he was hoping to take all those silly books,
As if you couldn’t buy books wherever you went!
She pinched her cheek and stared at the trunk again.
The green could come out, of course, and the blue go in,
But she couldn’t bear the idea of leaving the green.
The war, of course, and one thinks so much of the war,
And those terrible Yankees actually at our gates,
In spite of our fine, brave boys and poor Mr. Davis,
In spite of wearing old dresses for two whole years
And sending the servants out to work at the forts,
In spite of the cheers and the songs and the cause and the right.
Only, one must not be selfish. One must be brave.
One must think about Henry’s health and be sensible,
And Henry actually thinks we can get away. …
The blue or the green? She couldn’t decide it yet,
And there were all those letters to write tonight.
She’d simply have to write to Clay and Huger
About Henry’s health—and how it just breaks my heart,
But one cannot leave one’s sick brother—and afterwards,
One can always send one’s address—and I’m sure if they do
We’ll give them a real, old-fashioned Richmond welcome,
Though they say that the British leftenants are simply sweet
And every Southern girl is an absolute belle.
They play the “Bonnie Blue Flag” at the dances there,
And Sara Kenefick is engaged to an earl.
She saw herself, for an instant, walking the safe
Street of a calm and British-looking town.
She had on a new dress. Her shoes and her hat were new.
A white-haired, dim-faced man in a British coat
Walked beside her and looked and was listening,
While she told him all about it, and hearing the guns,
And how they’d actually lived without butcher’s meat
For weeks and weeks—and the wounded—and General Lee—
And only Henry’s
