Open Swim

In college, a favorite old and sometimes cynical professor used to say that the poet Robert Frost was an atheist who spent most of his time arguing with God. I liked this about Frost. I’d already acquired an affection for Wallace Stevens, but his soul was much too tranquil for my taste. He’d long given up wishing for what would never be, and so his poetry quickly became the benchmark for what I’d like to grow into after a few more reincarnations. In contrast, Frost—self-tortured and combat-hungry—was the reality of my Now.

I’ve traveled far since the days of those seminars, when I feverishly scribbled notes about the lives and motivations of two poets I’ll never meet in the margins of two pristine poetry anthologies. I was a little too cocky back then. Sadly, I was far too impressed by my own knowledge to appreciate how much suffering comes from trying to convince God he doesn’t exist—or from trying to convince one’s self that he does. Today—older, wiser, and a little less cynical—I realize I’m more like Frost than I ever knew. And in this affinity—in this very conflicted affection—I feel the depth of his heart, and mine.

Lately, I’ve found myself coming back to Frost’s treatise on wishing: Birches. Whether it was too nostalgic or simply too popular, my professor never assigned Birches; in my dog-eared anthology, it remains one of the few poems untouched by pen. Only recently, after becoming a mother to a boy, did I finally read it from start to finish. Now, every time I give it a read, I feel “Up to the brim, and even above the brim.” There is so much I could say about that poem and the odd combination of yearning and contentment it always sets off in me like lightning bugs in spring. My words don’t flow as easily as Frost’s, though. Instead, I feel saturated by that bittersweet hunger that comes with loving everything that will eventually be lost.

On the horizon are several casualties of time and evolution. In a few days, my parents will leave again, and the ephemeral safety of local grandparents will evaporate like New England morning fog. In the fall, Jack will change schools and leave the first friends he (and we as parents) ever made. Come this spring or next, we will move out of the house we’re renting (the first house I’ve made a home) and buy a new one. Like Frost, I am level-headed enough to understand that these changes are necessary threads in nature’s larger fabric. But I’m also a swinger of birches. I romance what could be and resist what is. Perhaps one day my soul will relax, and I will sip tea with Wallace Stevens on a lovely spring afternoon and celebrate the impermanence of all things beautiful. And yet, like Frost, there is a part of my heart that resists such a heaven.  I do not yet know how to love without ache. I have yet to find peace with God or with myself. But I feel better knowing that life and love share residence with a poem like Birches. In those blood-rich words—spliced together with as much complicated precision as the valves of a heart—I find God. And for the first time, I don’t feel like telling him he doesn’t exist.

BIRCHES

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.