Snow: Richard Wilbur's poem, "Boy at the Window"

Boy at the Window
by Richard Wilbur

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In the dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

From Good Poems selected & Introduced by Garrison Keillor, 2002

Born in 1921, Richard Wilbur grew up in rural NJ, went to Amherst, bummed around the country (46 states) on freight trains & rode in a coal car over the Rockies and served in the army in the Italian campaign in WWII.

In a search for "August," I found "work."

Working on school bags, UMCOR, 2013

 

I wanted to find another person's poem with August in the title. I began looking through the three shelves of poetry books, but tired quickly after five or six books and nothing. Aha, from Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, I found an even better section to match the work that's gone on around here this week (new flooring in the kitchen). Under WORK, I found the following piece by Bob Arnold.

 

No Tool or Rope or Pail

 

It hardly mattered what time of year

We passed by their farmhouse.

They never waved,

This old farm couple

Usually bent over in the vegetable garden

Or walking the muddy dooryard

Between house and red-weathered barn.

They would look up, see who was passing,

Then look back down, ignorant to the event.

We would wave nonetheless,

Before you dropped me off at work

Further up on the hill,

Toolbox rattling in the backseat,

And then again on the way home

Later in the day, the pale sunlight

High up in their pasture,

Our arms out the window,

Cooling ourselves.

And it was that one midsummer evening

We drove past and caught them sitting

Together on the front porch

At ease, chores done,

The tangle of cats and kittens

Cleaning themselves of fresh spilled milk

On the barn door ramp;

We drove by and they looked up--

The first time I've ever seen their

Hands free of any work,

No tool or rope or pail--

And they waved.

~~

In the biography section is this snippet: Bob Arnold (b. 1952, Adams, MA) is a carpenter and stonemason and poet whose family owns the oldest family lumber business in America, Arnold Lumber. "I took off for the woods after high school and don't plan ever to come out," Arnold wrote. Keillor's book was published in 2002.