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<h2> The Wood-Cutter </h2>
<p><i>The sky is like an envelope,<br/>
One of those blue official things;<br/>
And, sealing it, to mock our hope,<br/>
The moon, a silver wafer, clings.<br/>
What shall we find when death gives leave<br/>
To read—our sentence or reprieve?</i><br/>
<br/>
I'm holding it down on God's scrap-pile, up on the fag-end of earth;<br/>
O'er me a menace of mountains, a river that grits at my feet;<br/>
Face to face with my soul-self, weighing my life at its worth;<br/>
Wondering what I was made for, here in my last retreat.<br/>
<br/>
Last! Ah, yes, it's the finish. Have ever you heard a man cry?<br/>
(Sobs that rake him and rend him, right from the base of the chest.)<br/>
That's how I've cried, oh, so often; and now that my tears are dry,<br/>
I sit in the desolate quiet and wait for the infinite Rest.<br/>
<br/>
Rest! Well, it's restful around me; it's quiet clean to the core.<br/>
The mountains pose in their ermine, in golden the hills are clad;<br/>
The big, blue, silt-freighted Yukon seethes by my cabin door,<br/>
And I think it's only the river that keeps me from going mad.<br/>
<br/>
By day it's a ruthless monster, a callous, insatiate thing,<br/>
With oily bubble and eddy, with sudden swirling of breast;<br/>
By night it's a writhing Titan, sullenly murmuring,<br/>
Ever and ever goaded, and ever crying for rest.<br/>
<br/>
It cries for its human tribute, but me it will never drown.<br/>
I've learned the lore of my river; my river obeys me well.<br/>
I hew and I launch my cordwood, and raft it to Dawson town,<br/>
Where wood means wine and women, and, incidentally, hell.<br/>
<br/>
Hell and the anguish thereafter. Here as I sit alone<br/>
I'd give the life I have left me to lighten some load of care:<br/>
(The bitterest part of the bitter is being denied to atone;<br/>
Lips that have mocked at Heaven lend themselves ill to prayer.)<br/>
<br/>
<i>Impotent as a beetle pierced on the needle of Fate;<br/>
A wretch in a cosmic death-cell, peaks for my prison bars;<br/>
'Whelmed by a world stupendous, lonely and listless I wait,<br/>
Drowned in a sea of silence, strewn with confetti of stars</i>.<br/>
<br/>
See! from far up the valley a rapier pierces the night,<br/>
The white search-ray of a steamer. Swiftly, serenely it nears;<br/>
A proud, white, alien presence, a glittering galley of light,<br/>
Confident-poised, triumphant, freighted with hopes and fears.<br/>
<br/>
I look as one looks on a vision; I see it pulsating by;<br/>
I glimpse joy-radiant faces; I hear the thresh of the wheel.<br/>
Hoof-like my heart beats a moment; then silence swoops from the sky.<br/>
Darkness is piled upon darkness. God only knows how I feel.<br/>
<br/>
Maybe you've seen me sometimes; maybe you've pitied me then—<br/>
The lonely waif of the wood-camp, here by my cabin door.<br/>
Some day you'll look and see not; futile and outcast of men,<br/>
I shall be far from your pity, resting forevermore.<br/>
<br/>
<i>My life was a problem in ciphers, a weary and profitless sum.<br/>
Slipshod and stupid I worked it, dazed by negation and doubt.<br/>
Ciphers the total confronts me. Oh, Death, with thy moistened thumb,<br/>
Stoop like a petulant schoolboy, wipe me forever out!</i><br/></p>
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