Miles to Go

Yesterday was Robert Frost's birthday. It reminded me of when I was a child, visiting my grandmother's house. She used to quote "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and it wasn't long before I memorized it.  The quote she carried in her mind and on her lips was, of course "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."

Later in college I learned that Frost, already a mystery to me with his New England accent and shock of white hair, was also sort of a misanthrope, and that he told people his poem was not about death. I decided that last bit was a sort of railing against fame and the inquisitive proddings of the media. When my dad would go to bluegrass jams, some nights there'd be a young kid or two that came into the sandwich shop where it was held and said something like 'Have you ever heard of a song called Foggy Mountain Breakdown?' which of course is akin to asking a college pep band if they know "Crazy Train." Some nights they'd shake their heads "no" only to play it when they left. I thought Frost was being like that...like Foggy Mountain Breakdown requests when you've been playing bluegrass since before the cancer diagnosis and before the accident at the factory that cost you two fingers. No, no, Mr. Reporter, this poem is not about death. It's about snow and horses. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

To be fair, when I learned this poem, in my grandparents' unairconditioned house, it was not about death for me either.  It was about the alliteration of dark and deep, and rhyme and repetition, and hearing my grandmother, who was loveliness itself, say the word, lovely. I thought of how hard she worked to raise 5 beautiful, lovely children and the way she fried chicken in that hot kitchen, with the little oscillating fan gamely whirring around, fruitless but essential, like CPR breaths.  I thought about  how she looked when she would nap on the couch after lunch, crossword puzzle folded over her shirt, golf pencil balanced near long, light words like 'insouciant' and the ubiquitous small weightier ones 'amok', 'atoll' and 'ala' (a winglike organ or part).

When I got older, of course, I could see over the horizon of my life a little, and I could hear whispers about the shortness of life behind the church bells from the church across the street and the whistle of the train that came through town twice a day. My grandmother died when I was a junior in college, having kept her promises and walked her miles, and we felt bereft and cheated and lost. I learned more secrets from Frost, that "Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold....So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay."

I've been to Mr. Frost's grave, as it happens, and pondered his lovely, dark and deep journey, too. I have done a few funerals now, as an officiant and as a stricken mourner (held up by the sheer love of others, by songs and by prayer). I begin to see that the dark and deep woods of death is a pathway to another stage of being, another life, with God.  As Easter people, we don't think of those gone before in dark and snowy woods, all lost.  We think of them walking into groves of saplings with new green buds on them, into a new springtime of being with God. When I think of you, Mr. Frost, you are not in dark suit with macabre lantern on a snowy, lonely night.   You are a boy, shock of hair no longer white, climbing birches and swinging out into the great beyond of God's love.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Perhaps my first poem ever memorized was not about death after all, in the sense that death is not the end of the story. Perhaps it was really about the next morning, the dawn of the next day, when we awake from well-earned sleep and walk into the crisp morning and find a birch to swing on. Perhaps it points invisibly to an empty tomb and folks saying "He's not here. He's risen."

Mr. Frost, happy birthday--I shall see you in that great gettin' up morning and we'll read some poetry with a certain golden haired grandmother of mine. But first, I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.