Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
A house that is no more a house. Dissipative structures. Self-organizing systems that arise from the very powers of decay that slowly transform them into something else, the way the old woodpile disappears in “the slow smokeless burning of decay.” “Directive” is Frost’s most complete attempt to place us in this landscape of comings and goings, of momentary stays against confusion, of lives strongly spent. And the play of order and chaos, creation and negation, begins in these opening lines– “Back out… Back in…”– the house and farm and town that are at once dissolved into the second growth forests on the mountainside and still there in the belilaced cellar holes and in the mind of the walker who encounters them.
