When I came back to New Hampshire to live forever,
to live only in a box, I was afraid
that I would not write about it anymore.
I'd written about it all my life, poetry and prose both.
And being there in the center of it, I thought it might go away.
But I was willing to take the chance, and it proved illusory.
I'm writing about it more than ever.
One thing that has happened is that I've
been listening to a lot of the old people, as I always did.
The old people now were the middle aged people back then.
And a cousin of mine told me the story that led to this poem.
The man named Paul Fenton who's in his 70's.
He told me that when he was a boy,
he'd heard the story from an old man.
And that the old man had told him
that he had heard it when he was a boy from an old man.
So as Paul said, it goes back some.
You would know from the nature of the story,
it had to go back before the railroad anyway,
which came through about 1846.
It's a story about how somebody, a farmer,
made his living back before transportation like that.
It's called Oxcart Man.
In October of the year, he counts
potatoes dug from the brown field, counting the seed,
counting the seller's portion out, and bags the rest
on the cart's floor.
He packs wool sheared in April, honey and combs, linen,
leather tanned from deer hide, and vinegar in a barrel
hooped by hand at the forge's fire.
He walks by his ox's head ten days to Portsmouth market
and sells potatoes.
And a bag that carried potatoes, flax seed, birch brooms,
maple sugar, goose feathers, yarn.
When the cart is empty, he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold, he sells the ox, harness, and yoke.
And walks home.
His pockets heavy with the year's coin for salt and taxes.
And at home by fire's light in November cold,
stitches new harness for next year's ox in the barn
and carves the yoke and saws planks building the cart again.
When I heard the story, I was excited, thrilled,
and I was happy about it.
When I began to write the poem-- when
I was writing the poem over a long period,
I always thought of it as a happy poem.
When I began-- when I published it,
and when I began to read it at readings,
I discovered that it depressed lots of people terribly,
you know.
And people just thought, oh god, he
has to do it all over again, and so on.
It was like the myth of Sisyphus.
For me, it was--
[LAUGHING]
For me it's like the bottle being half empty and half full,
you know.
For me it was the wonderful regeneration,
the wonderful cycle.
The dying to be born again, over and over again.
The human life is like the life of a perennial plant.
And when people began to tell me about Sisyphus and so on,
I realized that I'd never dreamed
that a perennial plant might get discouraged every spring.
Having to do it all over again, you
know, the stamen, the pistil, everything--
oh.
Then somebody at one reading said
it was sort of like finishing one term of freshman English,
and then starting with another group.
[LAUGHING]
So I know that's there, you know, now the other side.
But also somebody pointed out to me
that Camus ended the myth of Sisyphus by saying,
and Sisyphus was happy.
I was saying to a few of you last night
about the English sculptor, Henry Moore,
saying that the secret of life was
to be totally committed to a desire and ambition that
was consuming, to which you devoted your entire life.
And that that ambition must be unachievable.
And Sisyphus was happy.
It seems to--
I think I make--
say more about the poem than the poem has, probably,
but I've been thinking about it lately.