To care exactly enough is the
chiefest thing,
And the least likely,
To bend some brittle branch
And sound the thousand crackling threads
Before (but never yet)
The whole tough shaft should crack apart. I swung
Birches rarely—often, though, wild grape
Vines cocked and shelved descending
Through ranks of seven-story trees above
The creek.
Tarzan was most in our viny minds
When we chopped the springy wood thing
Loose from the base where we could grab
Two-handed to launch ourselves in air,
Sag and rise
Like airplanes dipping off the carrier-deck
Free of the undergirding ledge,
The iron, the earth, the spongy leaf-breasted banks
Of childhood that was mine,
That for my own sagged memory and frazzled will
I cannot ever give away
Or back
To my own children, girl or boy,
To whom my world of nature stands a joke, a broken record
Of my rudely unfamiliar past.
I smell the thick woods now
Better than the hang of kitchen smoke,
More present than the sight of cars closing in the next lane,
Less, though, than the sight of leaves,
The press of pulpy stems, of ragweed rearing out of clay,
Strawberry seeds roughly tender on the fingertips,
Johnson grass and maypop stringers, Queen Anne's
Bowering the tired and breathing age I recollect and burn.
At the creek
There was a shallow place we could dam for a little while
With rocks and dredged bottom-sand,
Some slightly faster places
We could scoot vessels of bark and leaf and twig
Between and over rocks that I recall as being
Almost always brown, like pounded earth,
Two deep pools, one where we usually swam,
Could even dive from the stump.
The other
Was dark green, so deep,
Colder in the shade and depth, held snakes
We knew, had seen the crawling bubbles inch toward us
Floating like sample meat on logs, toes and knees
Too much in the water to protect. We were afraid
Almost all the time in there, loved
The cold fear, pushed it back and back
In our minds, almost never talked about it.
But when we were there we talked
In greener, deeper, colder tones than children knew
Outside their haunted darkened rooms. Afraid to be afraid
Or not,
We sometimes went alone, we boys, singly for the risk
Of finding one more chill and one more panicky story,
Some turtle slipping under logs we rode,
Some mucky underwater leaf-nuzzler we could only
Draw breaths over, not visions.
I learned not to be too afraid
To be alone. I still can shiver over soggy rafts
Of log-chunks washed to our creek in one more heavy rain,
One more heaving brown wave of a whole river now, the creek,
Ride the tree and grasp the spongy bark, feel heart in dark water,
And seeing where great brief tides ate the creek banks,
Carried off the trees and rocks,
Even the great big rocks
We never thought would spin
For thundrous God himself.
--by Robert W. Hill
[rev. 2/28/02]