[New-Poetry] Frost--The Vanishing Red

[David Graham]

The Vanishing Red
 
 
HE is said to have been the last Red Man
In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed‹
If you like to call such a sound a laugh.
But he gave no one else a laugher¹s license.
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,
³Whose business,‹if I take it on myself,
Whose business‹but why talk round the barn?‹
When it¹s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.²
You can¹t get back and see it as he saw it.
It¹s too long a story to go into now.
You¹d have to have been there and lived it.
Then you wouldn¹t have looked on it as just a matter
Of who began it between the two races.
 
Some guttural exclamation of surprise
The Red Man gave in poking about the mill
Over the great big thumping shuffling mill-stone
Disgusted the Miller physically as coming
>From one who had no right to be heard from.
³Come, John,² he said, ³you want to see the wheel pit?²
 
He took him down below a cramping rafter,
And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,
The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,
Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.
Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it
That jangled even above the general noise,
And came up stairs alone‹and gave that laugh,
And said something to a man with a meal-sack
That the man with the meal-sack didn¹t catch‹then.
Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right.
 
--Robert Frost.  Mountain Interval.


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David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
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