My love has concrete feet
Florence and the Machine, “Heavy in your arms”
My love’s an iron ball
Wrapped around your ankles
Over the waterfall
“…Earth’s the right place for love:
Robert Frost, “Birches”
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
Because I have a prosthetic memory, it takes an email to let me know that today is actually Cedar’s 6-month birthday. The AKC informs me she should now be at 60% of her eventual weight. She weighed in at 55.5 lbs last week, which puts her on course to be a well-grounded lady at 92.5 lbs.
![](https://sites.middlebury.edu/cedar/files/2022/02/Screen-Shot-2022-02-09-at-7.07.23-PM-1024x475.png)
Cedar’s weight projections have had me thinking about mass and gravity. Meanwhile, thanks to getting lost by night in The Wild Trees, I’ve found my gaze tilted up a fair bit lately. Is that tree actually climbable? Could one get to branches by climbing the tree next to it? What’s going on in that canopy?
On this morning’s walk, maybe a bit “weary of considerations,” I was thinking about Frost’s speaker in “Birches,” all bound up in nostalgia for youth and acknowledgment of age and limitations. Thanks to my Google prosthesis, I reread the poem when I got home…
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
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 twig’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. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
I thought about my college buddy, Dudley, a swinger of birches par excellence, who had refined the “sapling grab” where one can launch off a cliff, grab a treetop, and be sort of reverse-pole vaulted back to earth. I laughed at myself nearly 40 years later in “the pathless wood,” thinking about how much energy I put into not giving gravity too much of me to pull on. And I thought briefly about those great lines of consolation, “Earth is the right place for love / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” You don’t get there, to that ease of consolation, without aspiring higher.
Heavy, eh? Meanwhile, Cedar plods along needing no physics or poetry to keep it light.
![](https://sites.middlebury.edu/cedar/files/2022/02/66585939299__7AE9CF21-115E-4B47-8252-1C2E3B3D3F55-1-951x1024.jpeg)
![](https://sites.middlebury.edu/cedar/files/2022/02/IMG_2069-768x1024.jpeg)
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