The Way Back to Bread Loaf

My seminar came to my borrowed house:

a dark place where my golden-hearted wife 

and son and daughter slept so deeply,

though lightning struck it twice that June.

It was rivalrous Robert Frost’s old farm,

where he designed the stairwell in the back

so anybody taller than he was

would hit their heads as they tried to climb.                                                                                     

I offered to guide us back to the Barn

over mountainside cross-country ski trails:

“Come to leave the routine road,”

as Frost himself once wrote.

It wasn’t a “Road Not Taken”:

I had found my way five times,

and preened to lead these bright

young folks through the mazy mires.

We talked again about Herbert’s “Jordan”:

“Is all good structure in a winding stair?”

And suddenly I realized I had missed a turn,

but pushed along because I was “abashed,

and struck with many a sting of swarming fears,”

like the misguided wanderer of Herbert’s “Pilgrimage,”

with deerflies to enforce the point.

“I travailed on,” and yearned for Brandy Brook.

               *********************

But how wrong could we really go?

By now the Barn was bound to be

just down the slope. We got there,

though too late for lunch, and caked in mud.

What strikes me only now, a decade later,

asked to celebrate a Bread Loaf century,

is that our seminar had just continued

into metaphor: some willing wanderers,

none of whom really knew the way

through doubts, diversions, and shared noticings,

through ever-changing shadows, never black or white,

from sunlight playing in the tangles that are life,

the way we travel through the world

with ancient words upon our lips,

and if it left us hungry, that was for the best –

so much so that I feel I’m back there now

not needing any trail. We were pilgrims,

wading our small Jordans, as they sink

down to the Dead Sea, and we cross them

toward promised lands that could mean anything.