In farming country you are sure to find them,
Little gray wooden buildings boarded up,
Astride a stone wall, or lost in a thicket,
With what shut in? – Well, I think if you pried
A warped board free and climbed in through a window,
You might find much the same thing as I found
In the Yellow Shop on my grandfather’s farm:
Darkness at first; pencils of steady sunlight
Alive with dust, that slanted in through chinks,
And such a smell of cedar you would know,
Before your eyes grew wide enough to see,
That the place was full of stacks of fragrant shingles.
Then, tattered paper hanging from the wall,
Crude blue, perhaps, and red – brick-red – and brown,
That chocolate-brown the old folks seemed to fancy.
That might be all.
– Or might not be.
For after
I had stood there for a while, held by the quiet,
A sense of ended things grew up about me.
Someone had lived there once, – I think a cobbler;
It was a place where men had come and gone,
Men of my blood, whose names I did not know;
Whose feet had worn the hollow in the threshold
That let the light in underneath the door;
Whose lives had been blown out, one after one,
By the wind of Time, like candles in a row
Set up to be extinguished. – Yet this shell,
The haunt of dead men, still gave back the sun,
And stood up to the hail and sleet of winter.
– I gripped the nearest thing my hand could find,
A cleat someone had hammered to the wall
To help him clamber to the loft above,
And looked out through the window toward the wood-lot.
The shadow of the Shop ran dark across
The field, which but for that lay in the sun
Serene and smiling and inscrutable;
The air was sweet; blackberry and wild aster
Nodded outside the window in the shade,–
Perpetual things, that, springing year by year,
Are old, by repetition, like the sea;
There was a cricket busy in the stubble,
And a flutter of wings in bushes round the corner;
And in the place, the sense of something ended.
I nailed it up and left it there behind me.
And to this day I never pass the Shop,
Off in its corner, with its blinded eye,
With shingles curling loose and flecks of yellow
Still clinging to the silver of the gray,
But I grow insolent with glorying
In lovely life! – O dancing candle-flame,
Not yet blown out by the delaying wind!
Abbie Huston Evans, 1881-1983 – “Old Yellow Shop” from Collected Poems
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