THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT DIE

The seasons had beleaguered Evan Thane
With many a ravenous yearly trumpeting,
Pinched his defenses into crookedness,
And triumphed at the corners of his flesh,
And yet he would not tumble. Beards had wagged
Upon the lurking pestilence of humors
Pent in the damps to gnaw an old man's bones,
But no beards wagged for frosty Evan Thane.
He said he was no rotten Jericho
To shake for village prophets' reputations,
And scorned the bench where others whittled out
Their easy days with amiable discourse
Of usual death, -- until at last they died.
Grimly he watched them coward it away;
Glowered contempt beneath the funereal cedars
Scarce long enough to hear the falling clods
Rattle the wood, --then lashed his horse and fled,
Like one who leaves a shameful battlefield.

And never on any day of rain or cold
Dared villager ask of Evan Thane his health,
Implying thus that human flesh may fail.
They saw the bright uplifted head advance
Most casually where others bent and ducked;
They dreaded bitter dartings from his eye,
The old flesh reddening, the pursing lips
Spitting staccato vengeance through his beard,
And kept their tongues to whisper after him.
His house, like him, an aged careful watchman,
Blinked wary windows over Hunter's Knob,
Eyes for his every acre. None could buy
A foot of land from Evan. But he kept
One window, even by night, with lamp awake
Against the shade that throttled all men's throats.

He would not tell how swiftly years moved now --
Days like a silver flash cleaving the sky,
Nights but a rested sough of dark and stars --
But from his viny porch, as from a tower,
He peered out on the world's processional,
The clack of new machines, the pageantry
Of glittering strange dress and stranger speech.
He crackled his morning paper fervently
And clung on fast to the frayed edge of time,
Not crustily, but carefully, awake
Against the seasons' annual battering
And maladies that steal an old man's youth.
For still he would not die. He strode the hills
As if he would re-teem them from his life,
And kept within his heart the natural fire
To fill the air with blooms and sudden May.

And so one day the newcome Parson met him,
Bracing a corner of sky near a mended fence
And asked the forbidden question of the sage.
The Parson had not seen an aged man
Who could grow tall upon a passing breath,
Tower like granite (so he said) and flush
Like a ravaged cliff stung into scarlet spring.
He saw the white hair shaken indignantly
And heard quick speech, sibyllic fragments flung
From some strange inner might that was the man
The Parson set it down, or afterwards
He strove to, but he found it measureless
In notebooks, sermons, prayers, and flexless things.
The insurgent splendor of an ancient joy
Bereft the hills of death, and Evan stood
Apostle to their rapture, crying, "No!
I will not die...."
Then Parson knew that death was not a friend
To this old man who hailed the growing corn,
Germinant, like its grains, --in love with time
Because it gave expectancy of dawns
And fervor for to-morrow and live hope
That something might be better than before.
The hill-top was all blazed with noise of worlds,
A whirling scroll of kingdoms, cities, islands,
Seeded like fields with fates men might behold;
Of rivers dredged, that swift gray ships might bring
Cargoes to lands that never knew the sea;
Of marble buildings, yet unreared, and streets
Made newly splendid for such folk as hear
Music yet to be thought and songs unwritten;
Of islands fabulous at last disclosing
Secrets of buried tongues, old monuments;
Young heroes and fair women not yet born;
Tales unprinted, and ways of coming men
Plying the tangled threads of world desire
To some dim ever far-off unity.

Whether he heard or thought such things as these
The Parson could not say. He seemed to wake
Alone upon the hill-top, wondering,
Questioning what old Evan told him there.
The lizards flicked along the rotting fence;
A blue-jay rasped a call across the field;
And at his feet the ants ran back and forth.
Then evening made the distant hills more blue
With shadow, and he sought the weed-fringed road.
He saw the cornstalks withered by the sun
And a hawk, first prowler, swooping in a field
With deathly skill, so that he pondered much
Upon the Resurrection and the Life,
Hearing forever, like a trumpet-song --
"I must not die."...And so came dreaming home.
His lamp burned late that night. At one o'clock
He swept the futile papers from his desk
And girded up his soul to look at stars.
But there were none. Impenetrably dull,
The firmament was cloud, unanswering,
Except that high on Hunter's Knob one lamp
Marked Evan's yellow star against the night,
Giving back answer to his lonely question.
The morrow was the Sabbath. So he preached
Most on the Resurrection and the Life,
And preached for one wild face of all the faces,
Evan Thane's who said he would not die.

-Donald Davidson

from An Outland Piper. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1924.