This may be my last post for a few days. Tomorrow we leave for Amherst, Massachusetts, Land of Dickinson . . . although the local poet that we tourists think about most these days is Robert Francis. My in-laws live next door to Fort Juniper, the tiny house that Francis built in the 1930s or 40s and where he apparently once kept a chicken named Gladys in the fireplace. Now the house is a poets' retreat, owned, I think, by Mount Holyoke College, and I enjoy standing around with my coffee in the morning speculating about the resident poet's inner turmoil as I watch him shovel out his car. (And why do they all seem to be male? Isn't Mount Holyoke a women's college?)

As far as I can tell, these visiting poets do not keep up with Francis's habits. I have seen no chickens. And according to Donald Hall, who memorialized the poet in the essay "Bluejeans and Robert Francis," "all his life he loved to lie naked in the sun. . . . When he was old he sat naked in a chair behind a clump of trees. The year he died he still sunbathed, wearing only shoes and, on occasion, a hat." The new residents appear to have given up this habit, though possibly they discreetly return to it in the summer months.

I like RF's poems. Hall calls them "beautiful exact renderings of the creation he observed, touched, and celebrated. This creation includes baseball, which Francis wrote about as well as anyone . . . though he never cared for the game." This is a lesson for all of us: why only write about things we care about? Why not just look around and see what there is to see? Here, for instance, is "The Base Stealer," which demonstrates Francis's skill at concisely portraying action. I like it a lot. (But of course I also like baseball. What if he'd been writing about football? It's possible I wouldn't be interested in this poem at all. So really, how did Francis manage to write so well about a game "he never cared for"? And why is this parenthetical comment going on for so long?)

In short (to quote Dickens's Mr. Micawber, a fellow parenthetical rambler), I will be spending Christmas next door to Robert Francis's little fort, in a neighborhood that once housed Dickinson and Frost and their regular neighbors, and that still houses those regular neighbors, and driveways, and Christmas trees, and bawling babies, and itchy dogs. On Christmas Day I will take a walk up to the reservoir with my own itchy dog, and no one will know I am a poet. Which is just as well. It is often good not to be a poet.

Here's hoping you'll have a walk on Christmas Day too.