Classic Poem

At Jackson Corners, on Lincoln Highway,
Down there in God's own Country, “I'way,”
Under the apple-trees, behind the pickets,
In the rank quack-grass and the sumach thickets
And the black-eyed susans and the Solomon seals,
Is a yard with the craziest junk on wheels:
Dead Man's rusted, rotted swappings …
Battered hayricks with cradles sprung;
Gravel-carts with splintered tongue;
Buggies with wind-rent window-trappings,
And the horse-hair stuffing sticking through
The mildewed seats of faded blue;
Sagging phaëtons, cracked to the ribs,
With the lamps by the dash-board both askew;
Milk-wagons mouldy as old corn-cribs,
Their whipple-trees pivoted half-way round
Between the shafts still propped from the ground. . . .
One has a rain-speckled board for a prop,
With a handicraft sign, still to be read,
When the sun shines in, if you stand on your head:
W ILHELM S CHNEIDER —B LACKSMITH Shop . . . .
Springs and fenders of gaunt gray gigs,
Fifty grave-yard skeleton rigs,
Fit to join in a Dance of Death
With the horses that pulled and the farmers that whoa'd
(Hear the squeaking of their joints in jigs
Till the Man in the Moon seems holding his breath),
All dead together—bone, hide, and steel—
Derelicts all of the Open Road
Before the morning of the Automobile. . . .
Grease-less axles, hub-split spokes,
Nevermore to be auctioned hence …
Under gnarled apple-trees big as oaks,
Behind the palings of a paint-peeled fence.