By that time I was pretty well reduced To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang. “Now you know how it feels,” my brother said, “To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call them, That when it thinks it has escaped the fox By growing where it shouldn’t—on a birch, Where a fox wouldn’t think to look for it— And if he looked and found it, couldn’t reach it— Just then come you and I to gather it. Only you have the advantage of the grapes In one way: you have one more stem to cling by, And promise more resistance to the picker.” One by one I lost off my hat and shoes, And still I clung. I let my head fall back, And shut my eyes against the sun, my ears Against my brother’s nonsense; “Drop,” he said, “I’ll catch you in my arms. It isn’t far.” (Stated in lengths of him it might not be.) “Drop or I’ll shake the tree and shake you down.” Grim silence on my part as I sank lower, My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings. “Why, if she isn’t serious about it! Hold tight awhile till I think what to do. I’ll bend the tree down and let you down by it.” I don’t know much about the letting down; But once I felt ground with my stocking feet And the world came revolving back to me, I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers, Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off. My brother said: “Don’t you weigh anything? Try to weigh something next time, so you won’t Be run off with by birch trees into space.” It wasn’t my not weighing anything So much as my not knowing anything— My brother had been nearer right before. I had not taken the first step in knowledge; I had not learned to let go with the hands, As still I have not learned to with the heart, And have no wish to with the heart—nor need, That I can see. The mind—is not the heart. I may yet live, as I know others live, To wish in vain to let go with the mind— Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me That I need learn to let go with the heart. PLACE FOR A THIRD Nothing to say to all those marriages! She had made three herself to three of his. The score was even for them, three to three. But come to die she found she cared so much: She thought of children in a burial row; Three children in a burial row were sad. One man’s three women in a burial row Somehow made her impatient with the man. And so she said to Laban, “You have done A good deal right; don’t do the last thing wrong. Don’t make me lie with those two other women.”