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Meditations on Robert Frost

At thirteen, I received this book as a present from my Aunt Melody from Amarillo, Texas.

I really liked the short ones in those years: "Fire and Ice," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," "The Rose Family." Later I discovered the long narrative poems about marriage and miscarriage and misunderstanding, and glimpsed adulthood through the trees and hills of his landscapes.

Teaching Frost and poetry and critical thinking these last 14 years to seniors in high school, the poems have become part of my interior monologue. I can't choose a fork in the trail without muttering to myself, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..." And so this poem.

Two paths

It's good multiple realities meet
A mathematical need.
Nice when math and mental anguish agree.
In all the possible eventualities,
I can still feel the one with you and me.
"Two paths?" "One traveller?" True.
But "long I stood?" No. Untrue.
It's an instant when time tears,
When your future comes unglued,
When your one path, becomes two.
There's no "kept the first for another day"
With this life I've since made.
Everyday we step further away,
And yet it's a relief to know fate is a mistake.
The best road is the one you make.

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