Marsh Hawk Review

		Kathleen Spivack Straining 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.