Boulders, precariously perched on the edge of a precipice.
Do the residents of the huts down the mountain ever think of that boulder?
Maybe they thought not being directly under it would keep them safe, but what bounce might a boulder take -- freefalling, tumbling, hitting outcrops, sliding on scree, cracking to fragments, being not spherical in the least, and so on?
My guess is that they never think about it... or think about it every minute.
And in some moment when they aren't thinking of it... SPLAT!
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.' Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Smoke slowly rises from sodden woods; Millet 's steamed to feed the fieldhands; Egrets fly over foggy paddies; Hidden birds sing from lush tree stand. Mountain hikers study hibiscus, Under dewy pines chew sunflower seeds, Give mat space to any old traveler. Gull and I: wary of each other's deeds.
Among ten thousand writing styles, There's no one standard or measure. The styles: many, muddled, and free -- Form, the unattainable treasure. Talent in word-wrangling shows skill. Idea conveyance shows craft. Writers strive 'twixt have and have not -- Unyielding in shallow or deep draught. An escape artist of fine lines -- Yet time and space consume in kind. Intricacy excites the eye, But frugality soothes the mind. One of few words is not confined. Verbose writers drift the Undefined.
An old man in a lodge within a park; The chamber walls depicted all around With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound; He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read I heard the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.
