歌词
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees
I like to think some boy's been swinging them
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice storms do
Often you must have seen them loaded with ice
A sunny winter morning after a rain
They click upon themselves as the breeze rises
And turn many-colored as the stir cracks and crazes
Their enamel
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen
They're dragged to the withered bracken by the load
And they seem not to break
Though once they're bowed so low for long
They never right themselves
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterward
Trailing their leaves on the ground like girls on hands
And knees that throw their hair before them over their heads
To dry in the sun
But I was going to say when truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice storm
I should prefer to have had some boy bend them
As he went out or in to fetch the cows
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball
Whose only play was what he found himself
Summer or winter and could play alone
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them
And not one but hung limp
Not one was left for him to conquer
He learned all there was to learn about not launching out
Too soon and so not carrying the tree away clear to the ground
He always kept his poise to the top branches
Climbing carefully with the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim and even above the brim
Then he flung outward feet first with a swish
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground
So was I once myself a swinger of birches
And so I dream of going back to be
It's when I'm weary of considerations
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return
Earth's the right place for love
I don't know where it's likely to go better
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven
Till the tree could bear no more
But dipped its top and set me down again
That would be good both going and coming back
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches
