Sweet July air hits me as I unhook the rope across the doorway. The tour has moved on toward the smothering interior of the house and I turn back like a rip tide, apologizing to the man behind the desk.
I sit on a bench. Under a tree. In Robert Frost's back yard.
Deeper than two emerald football fields, the clearing—like everything else in New Hampshire—is sheathed in woods. A graveyard of Buicks and pick-up trucks in the 1950s that angered the Pulitzer winner and Camelot celebrity, who may have driven past it on the way to an award ceremony or a weekend with an heiress, now it lies quietly under the sun, a woolly blanket with perhaps a tiny rise here or there that might be a ghostly stack of hubcaps, metal pancakes that refused decay.
The air is hot but enough to move the leaves in their sideways gestures, tiny green hands saying More or less, more or less ...
Inside the sheet-white farmhouse the docent, a retired school teacher dressed like a Girl Scout in orthopedic shoes, recites her dates. Afterward, my friends tell me that another, younger guide offered to conduct "a darker tour."
The kitchen garden, the fruit trees and barn, the ambiguous equipment are a frozen snapshot with placards. They might be the stage of a play, or a diorama. The striving and doubt have been removed, all goals having been achieved.
Suddenly I am not alone. Another refugee walks past me, mutters something about the heat, and walks out onto the lawn. He sits on a boulder and faces the woods, then lies down beneath a tree. He can't be 30.
Frost was 37 when he left this place for Buckinghamshire, U.K. He was born in California. He was about as New England as a taco. Yet how frighteningly perfect, the lines inspired by clouds and cows. What a vortex of determination, picking up any object in its path and using it so deftly. How similar the work of a poet must have been to the work on this farm.
I'm sorry I missed the tour.
