Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile": Karma, Monuments, Warmth and Decay

The Wood-Pile by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation

Yesterday on my walk in the woods, I tried to get a glimpse, and maybe a photo, of a noisy woodpecker high up in a birch. She wasn’t shy, yet she kept the tree between herself and me. 

female Downy

Just yesterday I wondered who first told me that birds hide that way. Did I believe him? Even yesterday I wondered how much of it might be an old wives’ tale, though it makes sense that an animal, even a jackhammer like a woodpecker, would have that much strategy for survival—plus plain old, inglorious fear, or at least wariness, of some inelegant, leaf-stomping Other.

With our absence of snow in Michigan this year, and daytime temps in the 40s, I’ve also decided to stop protesting the bareness of stripped winter and to start noticing more the rich variety of wood and the patterns of branches, plus the few colors that do remain, muted but present.

So I go to Poetry Foundation, again, and “google” wood. They offer Frost’s “The Wood-Pile,” which I haven’t read for several years. In spite of its quiet understatements, one after another, I like it all over again. But when I get to the small bird (around Line 10), “careful/To put a tree between us when he lighted,” I remember the woodpecker, and there’s a whiff of my old suspicions about destiny, or some such thing, though the two atheists among my Sunday breakfast buddies chide me for such musing.

I’m pretty sure the dark-eyed juncos are staying around longer this year—I suppose because it’s warm. So I’ve had more time to appreciate how unexpectedly, humbly gorgeous they are. They’re almost a simple black and white, but their topsides are a kind of slate color, with a trace of blue in certain light, rather than simple chickadee black. And the white on the juncos’ bellies is creamy, not chickadee white. The division of color between their dark backs and off-white bellies is strangely precise, but it's also a soft, forgiving, subtle boundary. Juncoes make me think of some miraculous, downy version of porcelain. 

Except for the tails when they fly!  There are some crazy white feathers in the bottoms of those tails, but they appear only in flight, and the flash of them still surprises me every time.

Then comes Frost’s bird, with “a feather— / The white one in his tail.”  How many events do I have to chalk up to mere synchronicity or banal coincidence before I can start trumpeting Karma, Karma, Karma—and tell my more empirical friends to go sit on a log?

Or make it a wood-pile. Abandoned. A monument, discovered quite by accident, which causes a pretty wise, articulate old New Englander to wonder about it. Then wonder some more.

The wood-pile is peculiar; it seems to be all about decay—or the preposterous proposition of its warming the frozen swamp. With what? No fire is lit; the wood’s been idle for at least two years. 

 Maybe it’s a human warmth—which is implied in the monument’s very existence, plus the human labor that went into building it. Maybe it’s a ridiculous, futile, yet affirming act; maybe warming a frozen swamp is a gesture of defiance. I will die; this wood will die. But I have made something here, whether or not I get back to it, or anybody sees it, or thinks it’s fine. I’m a maker, and that’s better than decaying without creating and thereby protesting mortality. 

And finally, another human, a stranger, has discovered the monument,  stumbled onto it, pure dumb luck.

Or is it destiny? Or Karma, Karma, Karma? Whether or not that’s the right word, the music of it wins the day.   

The Wood-Pile by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation