That little Francis poem is a chiller, one I had forgotten. It has echoes in Frost's "The Black Cottage," although the two poems are very different in overall effect. There's also my little poem "The Turn," which picks up Francis's trope of the outer world invading the inner, although I wasn't aware of any influence. Frost's "The Thatch," another little-discussed gem, uses the trope as well. Maybe the fear of nature's invasive tendencies is so primal that we all reinvent such images independently.
RPW
The Turn
They told me if I went
my heart would break to see the place.
I said, It’s just a ruined farm, its land
leased out, the barn and buildings left to stand
unused; some facts we have to face,
no room for sentiment.
From half a mile or so
the house looked as it had before,
except for here and there a broken pane.
The fields lay newly disked, awaiting rain.
The barn still stood, though swaybacked more
than twenty years ago.
I walked the dusty path
and climbed the steps – then could not pass
the darkened threshhold where the door gaped wide,
the floorboards warped where rain had blown inside.
There in the cracks grew blades of grass
like harvest’s aftermath.
I turned and walked away.
That grass was all I had to see
to know that what our life inside had kept
outside – the rain, the dust, the wind – had crept
across the threshhold after we
were gone – and meant to stay.
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