| William
Kumbier
Many
contemporary poets imagine their dialogue with Frost almost as if it were a
rite of passage. Of the dialogues with Frost that we have
received over the years, one of the most skillful is William Kumbier's
"Franconia 1995" which captures the elusive beauty that Frost
once experienced there.
FRANCONIA
1995
Robert Frost lived here five years, just home
from
England. And it was here he
wrote—
this
was—his Mountain Interval;
just here,
where
one of Ridge Road’s backbone crests
and
clearing coincide. If you sit
on his porch
at
early eve, at just this privileged time
of
year, you can watch poets’ faces, shoulders
pop
up from behind the sumac, birches, blackberries
and
other green whose names escape, along the road.
Day
lilies, lupines fringe and bob the borders
of
a view that soars to mountains—Cannon,
Lincoln,
Lafayette—and then comes back
to
you, straight into heart. Anxious
to read
and
hear, we’re squinched on folding chairs
inside
his barn, a honeycomb of post
and
beam and light, abuzz, dusk gently
nudging
up against the swung back doors.
After
some soothing words from Don, who’s vowed
to
let God grow, strand, comb, curtail—or not—
his
geyserfroth of beard, we’re underway.
The
first one works his way to facing us,
reads
“Breakfast at Denny’s”: Palo
Alto blonde
co-ed
on rollerblades rejects an older Yankee
man
in favor of bronzed Stanford jock, despite
the
fact the Yankee used to make the best
cranberry
pancakes, worth at least a memory
he
shares. Another reads of
parrots, parakeets
and
cockatoos she’s known, until it seems
that
she’s become the bird who’s taken for
a
pet in stanza four. A third
ventriloquises
vegetables:
brash broccoli and “carrots with cheap
haircuts;”
a persuasive and especially solicitous,
provocative
eggplant in saucy, purple frock.
Many
directly indirectly have it out with Mom
or
Dad. Beside me sits my
daughter,
nineteen,
taking it all in, especially Lynn,
who
fires off nine urban haiku, each
with
bad ass attitude: she flicks
them off
on
scraps of 3 x 5s, like Letterman;
they
flap and fall like limpid luna moths.
I’m
reader number 31 or 32—it doesn’t help
to
count the ones before—and when I’m called
I
read a serenade, composed for one
I
loved, released tonight to reach another.
What
I don’t expect is that the words,
unheard
till now and only just discovering
their
sound and form, already fly from me,
too
fast, they’re heading for the shadows past
the
doors, when, just as suddenly, they’re caught
by
ears and eyes that keep them, giving them
the
warmth and weight they ask, then let them go.
It
is a time of deep, if passing, resonance
—and
some applause (my daughter’s, too).
And
when the reading’s done, our pocket
flashlights
halo us down the hill, our auras
catching
rocks, already fallen leaves, and pairs
of
Nike-ed feet ahead, all following
footsteps
on the road he took before.
William Kumbier
teaches world literature and writing at Missouri Southern State University
in Joplin, Missouri. He is pleased to have participated several times,
along with many fine poets, in the Frost Place Festival of Poetry in
Franconia, New Hampshire.
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