Poet's Choice

When Hayden Carruth died this week at 87 from a series of strokes at his home in upstate New York, American letters lost another colossus. He was an infantryman in World War II and came home to battle -- in prose and verse -- for causes ranging from nuclear disarmament to ecological farming. Like Robert Frost, he drew on the rural landscape and characters. He could orchestrate a symphony from plain American speech. "Regarding Chainsaws" opens when the admittedly "greenhorn" speaker is given an old chainsaw: "Bo Bremmer give it to me that was my friend,/though I've had enemies couldn't of done/no worse." He gets "a bursitis in the elbow" after yanking the cord "450 times." Eventually, Old Stan (a neighbor) buys it from him. But a few days later when he asks how the chainsaw is working, Stan says, "I tooken/it down to scrap, and I buried it in three/separate places yonder on the upper side/of the potato piece. You can't be too careful/. . . when you're disposing of a hex."

Unlike Frost's wise old country titans, these men fight with modern machinery in a climate where they, too, face becoming rusty and obsolete:

I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I

don't feel so good about that neither. . . .

. . . Stan was taken away

to the nursing home, and then he died. I always

remember how he planted them pieces of spooked

McCulloch up above the potatoes. One time

I went up and dug, and I took the old

sprocket, all pitted and et away, and set it

on the windowsill right there next to the

butter mold. But I'm damned if I know why.