Fetching my dearly beloved both and books

A long way to a mountain in a car,

I thought, Here's a true quiet in the country

We came to faithfully from so far.

Quiet in the country - I'd thought about it -

Was wind in the elms and over grass,

Water moving, and nothing at all all night.

That was what country quiet was .

Seven young roosters variant in key

With a seesaw choiring I learned

By rote from four to eight every morning

Taught me quiet is not so earned.

Woodpeckers also, loving our sugar maples,

Two vagrant horses stamping hollow ground,

A cow lost, grieving as lost cows do,

Told me true quiet is not so found.

Sounds in the country are out of sight.

Men cut hay, always somewhere beyond trees.

Trucks pass, but usually on another road.

Carpentry after dark, at the ears bees.

I made noise enough of my own all day,

But I knew when I had stopped chopping wood.

At night people and bears down cellar

Round the box where milk and fruit stood,

Gnawed, and shoved loose boards around.

Home now from crowing and the country quiet,

The hunter home from the hill, I lie late

Listening to doors, trains, feet, a regular riot

And most meaningful. There's this about it:

At home I know the noises I never see,

But think often of a working woodpecker

I watched all one morning up a tree.

Of this bird I am sure, and a blue shirt,

Though I could not say on whose land

It was, only the slow sound of his scythe,

And two blue arms, and a hat and a hand.