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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,
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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.”
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
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
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.
“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
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,
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,
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,
“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.
“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
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
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;
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,
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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