The one with bark on the log-wall back of him,

White shirt open, his hair combed with a hand.

Sun strikes the nose. The full lower lip closes

In shadow on the upper, and fine lines ray in

To the browed-over, half-lidded, shadowed eyes,

Or in, as if to a mid-focal point, to one eye,

Steel if you could see it, like a rifle aimed.

It is at rest in its weight, ready to score.

His eyes are the only unseen part of the picture,

But the whole thing is only a picture of his eyes.

The deep-water men get slitted, light-blued eyes,

The thousand-league look of fighter-pilots, and poets,

From staring further than eye is meant to, or in.

Frost's eyes count the fixed rhythms of change,

Fire and ice going in and out of fashion,

And see earth's the right place for good footing.

Back of his shoulder, between him and the wall,

Is the tip of a tough old man-tall country weed

Called steeplebush in books about wildflowers;

By farmers, hardhack. Fact-name and symbol-name

And hard to get rid of, as his poems will be.

One of his books he proposed calling Hardback,

To alarm his publishers. It came out Steeple Bush,

But the other word's still there, sticking up.

His hunter's, fighter's, old-star gazer's eye

Looks out on a world no better than it might be,

But no worse. He searches words, as lawyers do,

And remarks the dictionary limits him.

From metaphor's one face to another is as far

As target from telescope, or the microscope's

Nearer-than-near. The poet's eye lines them up,

Object and insight, in the wink of a word.

He has a word for everything, or for almost

Everything. About refugees he said,

I don't know what to do. I cry inside.

And said it again, It makes me cry inside.

The darkness draws him, the dark woods of death,

Of a sleep, of a giving up, of running away

Into the loneliness he does not fear,

The one thing he has not seen, but guesses at.

And the constant symbol will outlive him-birch-

But any sample is constant to a revisionist.

Things. He has taken a lifelong look at things

Out of love and need, remembering them all

With five senses and a sixth sense, words.

What time does to a face it does to the mind,-

Wears away all but enough to cover bone.

This picture is of wisdom, will, and the eyes.