He could have run a brookside mill,

A barny building, three old men

Working a twenty-foot soaked wheel

That dribbles out but drinks in

Power to turn one shaft, to tool

From country woods to wood a wooden

Use-bowl, dowel, or helve,

And happy there have been warden

Of such work and words, and selve

Himself, hoeing a nearby garden.

He could have raised apples, lived

Up ladders, in a mist of spray

Cursing the lost, boxing up the saved,

Washing apple's many enemies away.

He did. To prove it can be proved.

But his farming runs in and over

And out from book to brook to apple

And back again, till to discover

Emerson among the Baldwins, tell people

Apart from trees, is a leaf-dapple

In New England sunlight, names, names

Of his listeners flickering in fields

Of pages of chairs in classrooms.

Little by little the orchard yields,

Though the good shoulder lames.

Hungry for green, he sees ground-pine

Springing up underfoot, smells it,

Smiles, makes mystic Melville plain,

Sits Dreiser by Franklin on fence rails,

And wonders what century he's in.

He pounds in handy home-made pegs

To hold down larger transcendensions.

Not one to set up famous flags,

He is an explorer of five dimensions,

But needs more north for his own legs.

I think he's the happiest man I know,

And he doesn't. I measure myself by him

At distance, as worse and better do.

He wouldn't believe that he marks time

For anyone, or strides it so.

Now in his hale middle years he shouts

A huge joy from a ridge in Maine,

Buried in blueberries. The tax abates

Where a man's brush and bushes are his own.

It is his levy, not the state's,

Upon his own bones he pays, and glad to.

Hear him wake up the standing timber,

Joking or drawling his Thoreau or God.

He moves, he mills log and lumber,

Lecturing to build citizen-head.

Where autumn's red and spring's red

In some of the green, and the water-wheel

Pushes when the stream is full, he could

Have run a brookside mill, and did.

His lathe has grained the grain of wood.