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seclusion and how we’d come to resemble each other in that seclusion. We dressed so much alike that the inflections we did allow ourselves—tasseled loafers for the playboy, a black turtleneck for the rebel—were probably invisible to an outsider. Our clothes, the way we wore our hair, the very set of our mouths, all this marked us like tribal tattoos.
    The firemen looked us over, and we looked them over. Visitors snapped us to attention. There was one fireman in particular I found myself watching. He had tired-looking eyes, and held himself a little apart. He was less covert than the others in sizing us up. I thought about him after they finished and drove away.
    That was how I came to write my new poem, a narrative in which I described a fireman the morning after a big blaze. He’s been the hero that night, braving walls of flame to rescue a little girl. Now it’s over. He goes home and it’s Saturday morning and his son is watching TV. He fries himself some eggs but doesn’t eat them. He’s oppressed by the crumbs on the kitchen table, the dirty cereal bowls, the smell of burnt toast and last night’s fish. The television is too loud. Then he’s on his feet and in the living room and he’s just yelled something, he doesn’t know what, and his boy is looking at him with coldness and disdain.
    I thought writing should give me pleasure, and generally it did. But I didn’t enjoy writing this poem. I did it almost grudgingly, yet in a kind of heat too. Maybe it was good, maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t even a poem, only a fragment of a story in broken lines. I couldn’t tell. It was too close to home. It
was
home: my mother gone; my father, though no fireman, wounded by my disregard as I was appalled by his need; the mess, the noise, the smells, all of it just like our place on a Saturday morning; the sense of time dying drop by drop, of stalled purpose and the close, aquarium atmosphere of confinement and repetition. I could hear and see everything in that apartment, right down to the pattern in the Formica tabletop. I could see myself there, and didn’t want to. Even more, I didn’t want anyone else to.
    I submitted the elk-hunter poem. “Red Snow,” I called it.

FROST
    The day after John F. Kennedy won the presidency, George Kellogg won the audience with Robert Frost. Our paper printed his poem in a box on the front page, a dramatic monologue in which an old farmer feels the bite of mortality on the first cold day of autumn. George had used an odd mixture of tones. At one moment the farmer is lyrically drooling over the sight of the hired girl milking a cow:
    Old rooster struts the rafters while the barncat begs
Mewing at her feet in the stall where Flossie stands,
As with swift hard strokes of her soft white hands
She pulls the foaming cream into the pail between her legs.
    Then a few stanzas down he’s a terse fatalist:
    Corn’s high in the silo, hay’s stacked in the loft,
Cordwood’s halfway to the roof, doorcracks plugged with clay.
So let come what will, hard ground, short day,
I’ve done all I am able—and after all, the snow is soft.
    The poem was entitled, shamelessly, “First Frost.”
    In his telephone interview about the poem he’d chosen over all the others, Robert Frost told our reporter:
Young Kellogg has had some fun at this old man’s expense, and I guess this old man can stand some fun, if it isn’t too expensive.
He said he liked the joke of the milkmaid having soft hands.
All the milkmaids I ever had to do with could’ve gone bare-knuckle with Jim Corbett and made him bleed for his purse.
Frost suggested that a few winters on a farm wouldn’t hurt any young poet,
to learn that snow is no metaphor, if nothing else. But I guess I’ve dipped my bucket there a time or two, and your fellow Kellogg has caught me fair and square.
    I was astonished that Frost could’ve read the poem as anything but an act of fawning servility. But no, he seemed to think that George had written some