THE SOMETHING THAT ISN T
Randall Brown

On calendars alongside Rockwellian winter scenes that s where you re likely to find Frost. Maybe attached to an image of a boy swinging on birches, up toward the sky and transcendence. Always a catch, though, in Frost. Only on earth will the boy find love and of course death. There s always that.

Santa Claus, my students want to believe, stops in the woods, looks at the woods filling with snow, decides instead to return to his duties. The buried woods, the frozen lake, the stop, the darkest evening none of it makes an impression upon them. How many times have they wished an end to their work? Have they ever wondered what exists to bring that desired end, finally and forever? Perhaps it s better that they see Santa. The alternative isn t quite in the holiday spirit.

Oh, Robert, they seem to say, when they realize that the answer to the something there is that doesn t love a wall / that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it is, of course, Frost. Perhaps they can only picture Frost as an elf balancing boulders, fairy-like, almost playing as he builds. The indeterminacy of the something causes nary a shudder. What is it, really, that doesn t love this very human construction, that every winter rends it apart? Who can blame the students for not wanting to go there?

From commercials and commencements, they know The Road Not Taken and its simple message of taking the less traveled path. They ignore his ending sigh, that really the paths were worn about the same, the varied meanings of the difference at the end. Take the unpopular way in the world. Isn t that what Frost did as a poet?

So what, I ask them, is the difference? Ages and ages hence, where will your mind turn to the hands held or unheld, the lips kissed or missed? Why is it called The Road Not Taken?

So, they respond, are you saying that the poem isn t about the unpopular path? Some of them tremble slightly; move forward, to the edge of seats and desks.

A long figure in an isolated, desolate landscape. The leveled field in Tufts of Flowers, the far from home of The Woodpile, the blanketed whiteness of Desert Places. Verticality. The ladder in After Apple Picking, the stake about to fall in Woodpile, the bent trees in Birches. Nature bent on destruction. The storm in Storm Fear, the waves of Upon the Pacific, the horrific tableau in Design. Frost unnerves me, puts me in places I rather not be, plays with me as he builds a wall he doesn t seem to want or does he? Out there, the figures go, and something else is out there too, only maybe the something else out there s really something dark in there. And whether it s in there or out there, it s there. Bent on something. Something not very nice.

The highway dust is over all, Frost writes in The Oven Bird. Is it so because the world has indeed fallen or because we believe in the Edenic past? Either way, there it falls, much like downy flakes. The poem ends with the question of what to make of a diminished thing.

You, of course, make a poem. They ll put it on calendars. And in the middle of winter they ll look to it for comfort. I love that about Frost, this something he is that also he isn t.

© Randall Brown 2004

Randall Brown is currently at work in Vermont College's Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing program.

on to page 4   

back to THE GSG VAULT