MINSTRELS OF THE NIGHT
Woodland voices I have heard— Laughing waters, beast and bird; Red-squirrels jabb’ring while they eat, Cones a-dropping at your feet; Pecker diving for a worm, Ringing echoes with each squirm; Squawking jays and the palaver Of a pheasant breaking cover; But the strangest sound to me Comes when winds blow fitfully, In the darkness, like a moan— Chilling to the marrow-bone, Dying now upon the gale Like a far-off cougar’s wail. Now it rises—peevish, wild, Like the fretting of a child; With an easing wind the thing Squeaks like monkeys jibbering. Thus a leaning, scraping tree Sounds its spookish minstrelsy, When the night-wind, teasing so, Starts it rocking to and fro.
THE LONG BET
The mountain road will lead you past The shack. It’s easily told, the last Old tumbledown this side the ridge Of snags; a little bridge Is there that hasn’t yet dropped through. I don’t know how it is with you, But every time I see that shack It gets me somehow—calls me back And tries to speak. The caved-in shed Where some poor nag was fed His mighty little, and the rakes Upstanding still—and scattered shakes, Tell how they labored to deceive The man with hope. In make-believe They played a barn—and over there The several-acre clearing where A few anæmic blades of grain Still volunteer; but oh That Potter’s Field where grow In broken rows of twos and threes The little, weazened apple-trees.
Mere stalks are some, that died Beside the stakes where they were tied, While others held tenaciously Their stunted semblance to a tree— Their dangling leaves are sparse And bloodless—so the farce Goes on. I know he stood that day He planted them and looked away Across his claim—beyond that draw Where all the ghost-trees are, and saw Them fade away and in their stead A smiling orchard with its red Fruit-laden boughs. At any rate He likely staked with fate What all he had—all he could get, And made his one long bet.
He staked the woman too— That calico of faded blue Still waving by the kitchen door, The shreds of curtains on the four Wee windows on the front, proclaim There was a woman in the game. Lord, how he must have strung Her on—to drag her up among Those snags! And what it must have been In winter! Think of living in That tumbly hut—eight feet of snow Outside—and ten below. Suppose the woman took her bed, Caved in, just like the shed Is now—upon her back laid flat, (The work alone would tend to that).