| |
| WHAT tree may not the fig be gathered from? | |
| The grape may not be gathered from the birch? | |
| It’s all you know the grape, or know the birch. | |
| As a girl gathered from the birch myself | |
| Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn, | 5 |
| I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of. | |
| I was born, I suppose, like anyone, | |
| And grew to be a little boyish girl | |
| My brother could not always leave at home. | |
| But that beginning was wiped out in fear | 10 |
| The day I swung suspended with the grapes, | |
| And was come after like Eurydice | |
| And brought down safely from the upper regions; | |
| And the life I live now’s an extra life | |
| I can waste as I please on whom I please. | 15 |
| So if you see me celebrate two birthdays, | |
| And give myself out of two different ages, | |
| One of them five years younger than I look— | |
| |
| One day my brother led me to a glade | |
| Where a white birch he knew of stood alone, | 20 |
| Wearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves, | |
| And heavy on her heavy hair behind, | |
| Against her neck, an ornament of grapes. | |
| Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year. | |
| One bunch of them, and there began to be | 25 |
| Bunches all round me growing in white birches, | |
| The way they grew round Leif the Lucky’s German; | |
| Mostly as much beyond my lifted hands, though, | |
| As the moon used to seem when I was younger, | |
| And only freely to be had for climbing. | 30 |
| My brother did the climbing; and at first | |
| Threw me down grapes to miss and scatter | |
| And have to hunt for in sweet fern and hardhack; | |
| Which gave him some time to himself to eat, | |
| But not so much, perhaps, as a boy needed. | 35 |
| So then, to make me wholly self-supporting, | |
| He climbed still higher and bent the tree to earth | |
| And put it in my hands to pick my own grapes. | |
| “Here, take a tree-top, I’ll get down another. | |
| Hold on with all your might when I let go.” | 40 |
| I said I had the tree. It wasn’t true. | |
| The opposite was true. The tree had me. | |
| The minute it was left with me alone | |
| It caught me up as if I were the fish | |
| And it the fishpole. So I was translated | 45 |
| To loud cries from my brother of “Let go! | |
| Don’t you know anything, you girl? Let go!” | |
| But I, with something of the baby grip | |
| Acquired ancestrally in just such trees | |
| When wilder mothers than our wildest now | 50 |
| Hung babies out on branches by the hands | |
| To dry or wash or tan, I don’t know which, | |
| (You’ll have to ask an evolutionist)— | |
| I held on uncomplainingly for life. | |
| My brother tried to make me laugh to help me. | 55 |
| “What are you doing up there in those grapes? | |
| Don’t be afraid. A few of them won’t hurt you. | |
| I mean, they won’t pick you if you don’t them.” | |
| Much danger of my picking anything! | |
| By that time I was pretty well reduced | 60 |
| To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang. | |
| “Now you know how it feels,” my brother said, | |
| “To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call them, | |
| That when it thinks it has escaped the fox | |
| By growing where it shouldn’t—on a birch, | 65 |
| Where a fox wouldn’t think to look for it— | |
| And if he looked and found it, couldn’t reach it— | |
| Just then come you and I to gather it. | |
| Only you have the advantage of the grapes | |
| In one way: you have one more stem to cling by, | 70 |
| And promise more resistance to the picker.” | |
| |
| One by one I lost off my hat and shoes, | |
| And still I clung. I let my head fall back, | |
| And shut my eyes against the sun, my ears | |
| Against my brother’s nonsense; “Drop,” he said, | 75 |
| “I’ll catch you in my arms. It isn’t far.” | |
| (Stated in lengths of him it might not be.) | |
| “Drop or I’ll shake the tree and shake you down.” | |
| Grim silence on my part as I sank lower, | |
| My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings. | 80 |
| “Why, if she isn’t serious about it! | |
| Hold tight awhile till I think what to do. | |
| I’ll bend the tree down and let you down by it.” | |
| I don’t know much about the letting down; | |
| But once I felt ground with my stocking feet | 85 |
| And the world came revolving back to me, | |
| I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers, | |
| Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off. | |
| My brother said: “Don’t you weigh anything? | |
| Try to weigh something next time, so you won’t | 90 |
| Be run off with by birch trees into space.” | |
| |
| It wasn’t my not weighing anything | |
| So much as my not knowing anything— | |
| My brother had been nearer right before. | |
| I had not taken the first step in knowledge; | 95 |
| I had not learned to let go with the hands, | |
| As still I have not learned to with the heart, | |
| And have no wish to with the heart—nor need, | |
| That I can see. The mind—is not the heart. | |
| I may yet live, as I know others live, | 100 |
| To wish in vain to let go with the mind— | |
| Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me | |
| That I need learn to let go with the heart. | |
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