Gathering Leaves
By Robert Frost
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?
Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.
Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?
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Friday was much too hot for May, though not nearly as bad as Saturday is supposed to be -- over 95 degrees -- so I spent the whole afternoon in the basement organizing and packing books to be donated -- I am sad breaking up my big Arthurian collection, but a lot of those volumes are in the public domain and available on Bartleby or various other sites. I still haven't decided what to do with The Mists of Avalon, which was so influential in my own life, but MZB is such a monster that if I debate watching new Harry Potter movies, I feel like there's no way I can reread Bradley's books undistracted by that knowledge.
We did take a walk in the late afternoon heat -- I hadn't yet made it into the shower, having swept the deck, fed the birds, cleaned up after the cats, and various other activities I wanted to get done first -- then I washed up and we went to my parents' for dinner. When we got home, we watched the third episode of The Essex Serpent, which continues to be well acted but the story is very slow to unfold, then we watched Senior Year, which is like a watered-down Mean Girls with some random Pitch Perfect thrown in; I like Rebel Wilson but she deserves better scripts. These are our neighborhood deer:
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