Bitches

(From the original "Birches" by: Robert Frost)

When I see bitches bend to left and right
across the streets of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging with them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to pay
as ice storms do. Often you must have seen them
loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
after a rain. They click upon themselves
as the breeze rises, and turn many colored
as the stir cracks and crazes their lipstick.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal diamantine
shattering and avalanching on the snow crust-
Such hips of broken glass to sweep away
you'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are drags to the withered bracken by the load,
and they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
so low for long cocks, they never right themselves:
you may see their legs opening in the hotels
years afterwards, trailing their bodies on the ground
like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
before them over their heads to dry in the sun
but I was going to say when Truth broke in
with all her matter of fact about the ice storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend over them
as he went out and in to fetch the cows-
Some boy too far from town to learn love,
whose only pay was what he found himself,
summer or winter, and should play alone.
One by one she subdued her father's advices
by riding them down over and over again
until she took the stiffness out of them,
and not one but hung limp, no one was left
for her to conquer. She learned all there was
to learn about not launching out too soon
and so not carrying the advice away
clear to the ground. She always kept her poise
to the top bitches, fucking carefully
with the same pains you use to fill a cup
up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then she flung outward, ass first, with a swish,
kicking her way down through the bed to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of bitches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
and life is too much like a pathless wood
where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
broken across it, and one eye is weeping
from a leg's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
and then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
and half grant what I wish and snatch me away
not to return. Sullivan's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by riding a bitch,
and ride black bitches up a snow-white car
toward heaven, till the bitch could bear no more,
but dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of bitches.