A Stand of Birches

Tall as if standing on jointed stilts,
This upright scaffolding,
These delicate laths
Firm to an altitude,
Much as seven-league boots might change
The gangling third son of all fairy-tale
To one fit to win The Princess.

There is something in this silhouette
Of courtier and hobbledehoy,
Opposites strung like wire over the high
Paneling of the shoulders: impatient, cool;
A laconic herald;
Pan in an Ascot tie.

There is a gardener, too, stubborn, yare,
Whose work terraces the rough hillsides
Of language, possessed
By a nomad cast of mind that ranges
Furlongs; till
That full moon, metaphor,
Comes to light up a landscape
Of solitude and distance.

Something that Holbein would have paused
Over informs this face:
He might have seen
Painted on wood—the clean
Jaw and square brow, caught in those shadowed eyes
Vision that brought cathedrals higher, higher,
Lofty as there was stone for them;
All lit, all colored by
A heaviness of light,
Our New England Gothic chiaroscuro.

So, like a stand of birches, be briary, bend,
Touch earth, whip back to your high stance again.