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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Raymond Holden

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Sugaring

Raymond Holden

A MAN may think wild things under the moon—

In March when there is a tapping in the pails

Hung breast-high on the maples. Though you sink

To boot-tops only in the uncrusted snow,

And feel last autumn’s leaves a short foot down,

There will be one among the men you meet

To say the snow lies six feet level there.

“Not here!” you say; and he says, “In the woods”—

Implying woods that he knows where to find.

Well, such a moon may be miraculous,

And if it has the power to make one man

Believe a common February snow

The great storm-wonder he would talk about

For years if once he saw it, there may be

In the same shimmering sickle over the hill

Vision of other things for other men.

……………

The moon again!

Playing tonight with vapors that go up

And out into the silver. The brown sap works

Its foamy bulk over the great log fire.

Colors of flame light up a man, who kneels

With sticks upon his arm, and in his face

A grimace of resistance to the glow.

All that is burning is not under here

Boiling the early sap—I wonder why.

It is as calm as a dream of paradise

Out there among the trees, where runnels make

The only music heard above the sway

Of branches fingering the leaning moon.

And yet a man must go, when the sap has thickened,

Up and away to sleep a tired sleep,

And dream of dripping from a rotting roof

Back into sap that once was rid of him.

I wonder why, I wonder why, I wonder …

……………

Close the iron doors and let the fire die,

And the faint night-wind blow through the broken walls.

The sugar thickens, and the moon is gone,

And frost threads up the singing rivulets.

I am going up the mountain toward the stars,

But I should like to lie near earth tonight—

Earth that has borne the furious grip of winter

And given a kind of birth to beauty at last.

Look!—the old breath thrills through her once again

And there will be passion soon, shaking her veins

And driving her spirit upward till the buds

Burst overhead, and swallows find the eaves

Of the sugar-house untroubled by the talk

Of men gone off with teams to mend the roads.

I think I shall throw myself down here in the snow

So to be very near her when she stirs.