PART III
NEWS NOTES OF PORTAGE, WISCONSIN
I
THE KILBOURN ROAD
In June the road to Kilbourn is a long green hall,
A corridor of leafage pillared white
By birches and with wild-rose patterns on the wall,
And all melodious with the fluid fall
Or lift of red-winged blackbirds fluting mating cries.
The very air
Is visible, not by the light,
Not by the shades that drift
And dip, but by an essence rhythmic with the flood
That flows
Not in the sap, not in the blood,
But otherwhere.
And of that essence grows
All men see in the air of Paradise.
He lay upon a little upland slope
Deep, deep with grass.
And when I saw his head above the green
Where I must pass,
The battered hat, the squinting eyes
Blinking the westering sun, I felt a sting of fear——
Alas, that in June’s delicate demesne
A watching human face can teach one fear.
So then I spoke to him, gave him good day,
And seeing his gun said what I always say
Meeting a huntsman: “Friend, I hope
You have killed nothing here.”
He stared and grinned. And with his grin
I felt his trustiness. So when
He scrambled down the bank and followed me,
I waited for him as my kind and kin.
He was a thing of seventeen. And men
Compounded in his blood had set him here
Wizened and hump-backed. But his little face
Held something of the one he was to be
In some eternity.
He talked as freely as a child. He’d shot, he said,
At a young wood-chuck. Now his gun was broke,
And it’d cost a dollar and a half
To mend it. Then I spoke
About a little kerchief made of lace
Lost on the road that day. He turned his head.
“Did it have money in it, Lady?”—with quick grace
Caught from some knightlier place.
And when I asked him what he read
He tried to rise to all my speech awoke.
“A person give me a book a while ago.
Oh, I donno
The name—the cover’s off. I got, I guess,
Two pages done. Time the stock’s fed
I get so sleepy I jump into bed.”
—And with this, for defence, a rueful laugh.
I named the town not two miles distant. No,
He hardly ever went there. Motion picture show?
His eyes lit. Several times he’d been.
War pictures was the best. He liked to kill?
He hung his head. “No, but I never will
Shoot pups or kittens when they want me to.
War’s different.” School? He’d seen
Four years of that—well, four years, more or less.
Dad needed him—dad had so much to do.
So then I faced him and his need to live.
I put it plain: “But you?
What do you want to do?”
His answer lay within him, ready made.
He met my eyes with all he had to give.
“I’d like,” he said, “to learn the artist trade.”
Questioned, he told me bit by little bit.
He’d had a horse that died—he’d painted her.
He’d painted Tige, the dog. The pigeon house.
The fence that crossed the slough. The willow tree.
Would he let me see?
Oh, well—they wasn’t much. He couldn’t stir——
The paint right, and he didn’t have enough.
All that he’d done was rough.
I tried to spell his dream,—to see if his face lit
At flame of it.
He only said: “Mebbe I couldn’t learn.”
And his eyes did not burn.
(“Perhaps,” I thought, “there’s nothing here at all.”)
“Dad’s going to have me paint the house,” he said.
I questioned where he led.
“Yellow and brown,” he answered. And my fancy’s fall
He must have fathomed in my face for a slow red
Mounted and swept his cheek. His eyes sought mine,
His look was piteous with a kind of light.
“I don’t like that. They picked it out,” he said. “I wanted white.”
And all his tone was shame.
The craftsman wounded in his craftsman’s right
In ways he could not name.
He took the cross-road. Where I saw him go
Wild fever-few made narrow paths of snow
Through the flat fields of dying afternoon.
Bravely in tune
With every little part as with some whole
A red wing answered to an oriole
And met a cat bird’s call.
The sun! The sun! The road to Kilbourn like a long green hall!
The very air a spirit like our own
So nearly shown
That one could almost see.
The veil so thin that presence was outrayed.
But all the great blue day came facing me,
And crying from the vault and from the sod:
“Oh God, oh God.
‘I’d like,’ he said, ‘to learn the artist trade!’”