The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
  And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
  Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
  And from there those that lifted eyes could count
  Five mountain ranges one behind the other
  Under the sunset far into Vermont.
  And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
  As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
  And nothing happened: day was all but done.
  Call it a day, I wish they might have said
  To please the boy by giving him the half hour
  That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
  His sister stood beside him in her apron
  To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
  As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
  Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
  He must have given the hand. However it was,
  Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
  The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
  As he swung toward them holding up the hand
  Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
  The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
  Since he was old enough to know, big boy
  Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
  He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
  The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
  So. But the hand was gone already.
  The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
  He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
  And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
  No one believed. They listened at his heart.
  Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
  No more to build on there. And they, since they
  Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

'Desert Places'

  Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
  In a field I looked into going past,
  And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
  But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

  The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
  All animals are smothered in their lairs.
  I am too absent-spirited to count;
  The loneliness includes me unawares.

  And lonely as it is, that loneliness
  Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
  A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
  With no expression, nothing to express.

  They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
  Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
  I have it in me so much nearer home
  To scare myself with my own desert places.