A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears and Some Books

Old Davis owned a solid mica mountainIn Dalton that would some day make his fortune.There'd been some Boston people out to see it:And experts said that deep down in the mountainThe mica sheets were big as plate glass windows.He'd like to take me there and show it to me.

"I'll tell you what you show me. You rememberYou said you knew the place where once, on Kinsman,The early Mormons made a settlementAnd built a stone baptismal font outdoors--But Smith, or some one, called them off the mountainTo go West to a worse fight with the desert.You said you'd seen the stone baptismal font.Well, take me there."

"Huh, that old bath-tub, what is that to see?Let's talk about it."

"To shut you up I'll tell you what I'll do:I'll find that fountain if it takes all summer,And both of our united strengths, to do it."

"Not so but I can find it.No doubt it's grown up some to woods around it.The mountain may have shifted since I saw itIn eighty-five."

"If I remember rightly, it had sprungA leak and emptied then. And forty yearsCan do a good deal to bad masonry.You won't see any Mormon swimming in it.But you have said it, and we're off to find it.Old as I am, I'm going to let myselfBe dragged by you all over everywhere--"

"I am a guide,And that's why I can't decently refuse you."

We made a day of it out of the world,Ascending to descend to reascend.The old man seriously took his bearings,And spoke his doubts in every open place.

We came out on a look-off where we facedA cliff, and on the cliff a bottle painted,Or stained by vegetation from above,A likeness to surprise the thrilly tourist.

"Well, if I haven't brought you to the fountain,At least I've brought you to the famous Bottle."

"I guess you'd find the fountain just as empty.And anyway this tells me where I am."

"You mean miles from that Mormon settlement?Look here, you treat your guide with due respectIf you don't want to spend the night outdoors.I vow we must be near the place from whereThe two converging slides, the avalanches,On Marshall, look like donkey's ears.We may as well see that and save the day."

"For God's sake, aren't you fond of viewing nature?You don't like nature. All you like is books.What signify a donkey's ears and bottle,However natural? Give you your books!Well then, right here is where I show you books.Come straight down off this mountain just as fastAs we can fall and keep a-bouncing on our feet.It's hell for knees unless done hell-for-leather."

We struck a road I didn't recognize,But welcomed for the chance to lave my shoesIn dust once more. We followed this a mile,Perhaps, to where it ended at a houseI didn't know was there. It was the kindTo bring me to for broad-board panelling.I never saw so good a house deserted.

"Excuse me if I ask you in a windowThat happens to be broken," Davis said."The outside doors as yet have held against us.I want to introduce you to the peopleWho used to live here. They were Robinsons.You must have heard of Clara Robinson,The poetess who wrote the book of versesAnd had it published. It was all aboutThe posies on her inner window sill,And the birds on her outer window sill,And how she tended both, or had them tended:She never tended anything herself.She was 'shut in' for life. She lived her wholeLife long in bed, and wrote her things in bed.I'll show you how she had her sills extendedTo entertain the birds and hold the flowers.Our business first's up attic with her books."

We trod uncomfortably on crunching glassThrough a house stripped of everythingExcept, it seemed, the poetess's poems.Books, I should say!--if books are what is needed.A whole edition in a packing-case,That, overflowing like a horn of plenty,Or like the poetess's heart of love,Had spilled them near the window toward the light,Where driven rain had wet and swollen them.Enough to stock a village library--Unfortunately all of one kind, though.They had been brought home from some publisherAnd taken thus into the family.Boys and bad hunters had known what to doWith stone and lead to unprotected glass:Shatter it inward on the unswept floors.How had the tender verse escaped their outrage?By being invisible for what it was,Or else by some remoteness that defied themTo find out what to do to hurt a poem.Yet oh! the tempting flatness of a book,To send it sailing out the attic windowTill it caught the wind, and, opening out its covers,Tried to improve on sailing like a tileBy flying like a bird (silent in flight,But all the burden of its body song),Only to tumble like a stricken bird,And lie in stones and bushes unretrieved.Books were not thrown irreverently about.They simply lay where some one now and then,Having tried one, had dropped it at his feetAnd left it lying where it fell rejected.Here were all those the poetess's lifeHad been too short to sell or give away.

"Take all you want.Good-looking books like that." He picked one freshIn virgin wrapper from deep in the box,And stroked it with a horny-handed kindness.He read in one and I read in another,Both either looking for or finding something.

All the way home I kept rememberingThe small book in my pocket. It was there.The poetess had sighed, I knew, in heavenAt having eased her heart of one more copy--Legitimately. My demand upon her,Though slight, was a demand. She felt the tug.In time she would be rid of all her books.