Sojourning alone in Paris, he thought, now finally he was a poet. All the props were his: the cloak, the hat like a cringing accordion, the mustache, the walking stick pronouncing ends-of-sentences on the sidewalk.
Only he had not reckoned on the loneliness. Isolate, terrible as a lavatory, it chilled him, coming in from the warm purple streets. His room lay in the darkness like a terrapin, promising nothing.
Something unseen, a posterity, crouched in the corners, watching, ticking off his movements: his forearms as he washed his shirt on the basin; the casual lighting of a match. That eerie tiger noticed everything. His neck prickled at his writing stand.
“If you love me, guard my solitude,” he wrote to endless mistresses, his wife, his friends. Solitude! It is the sallow wallpaper of furnished rooms. Worried as a snail, he worked, extruding a thin slimy track.
While to him a young man earnestly wrote: Dear Mr. Rilke, how shall I become a poet, having a most desperate longing to do so, and in my bosom some small songs?
The
Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire
Robert Frost, your homestead
in Derry, New Hampshire
is a mess: the orchard
out back has been cut down; the ground has been stripped of its topsoil
and is an auto wrecking yard. In the moonlight the subsoil glitters like Christmas with cracked windshields; discarded tires wreathe the mounds where apple trees once stood.
Route 28 passes right out
front. I lay awake,
acquainted all one night with the upstairs front bedroom where you listened to the breathing of your children
in nineteen oh seven. Now diesel trucks and souped-up cars shift gears by the front door. They are more deafening than rain. There is a trailer camp across the way
where you used to do all that
meeting and passing. The
brook’s a brown polluted stink. It’s impossible to get hired help; and they’ve torn out your kitchen to make it
workable. They have moved in a
fellow who says he is a
poet. But who knows?
This poet has a wife who
isn’t in the least a silken tent
nor he. Living on food stamps,
they are substantial
human beings who don’t
know a damn thing about
farming.
A tramp came to the door today, some bearded hippie from out west named Patrick, who thinks you’re the greatest. This fellow hitchhiked all the way from Montana
to see this place where you
lived and worked. Now
Patrick, the poet and the wife are sitting in the green remodeled kitchen in what used to be your farmhouse
and rapping (that’s the word they use these days) about you, Robert Frost, you lousy farmer, who sold this farm and got out of New Hampshire
the minute your grandfather’s
will said you could. The
farm’s so mean and poor no one could make it pay so you did what you could do best which was to write, (and some of the walls you mended are still standing.)
When you finally sold the
Derry farm you wrote:
“It shall be no trespassing/ If I come again some spring In the gray disguise of years/ Seeking ache of memory
here.” The new owner
auctioned the topsoil to make the down payment;
later he sold to the auto
wrecking yard. That’s progress, I guess. But you were so paradoxical you were to look back on that hen scratching in Derry as in an idyll
in a long line of insanities
and death. (“What but
design of darkness to appall?”) The first child died and was buried in the snow but four slept still in a safe white whisper.
I should be telling you this
in perfect metrics: an
approximation of the heart will have to do. To suffer so much and still to go on writing was either famous Frost perversity or courage.
Years later, after your wife
had died, she sent you
back with her ashes to scatter them. You drove up to the door on the highway home and found the farm scarred by strangers,
irretrievably.
And you turned away with the ashes past the house, past the broken glass, the wreckage, the ruined
fields, and walked out
on New Hampshire for the second time, to sleep in America forever.
