290
“asking for my human breath”
Trust in Maxine Kumin
am writing in my journal in the black-
ness of the barn while waiting for a mare to foal.” Is this Tolstoy working up
a farm scene for Anna Karenina? “Sawdust bedding is heaped in a bin roughly
fifteen by six feet parallel to the last stall on the south side. This week I am sleep-
ing in the bin on the levelled-out pile.” Not a very favorable spot for the creative
spirit? “Although her milk-bag is full and hard, night after night she resists
dropping her foal.... I overhear every rustle, munch and snore.” Perhaps the
worthy Russian is losing valuable time? “If the mare lies down, I wake up.”
New England readers and many others will recognize not Count Leo Tolstoy
but New Hampshire ’s and the nation’s onetime poet laureate, Maxine Kumin
(b. 1925). One journal entry speaks in the third person: “A woman creeps on all
fours through a squash patch in mid-September seeking out the late bloomers.”
Another records tapping maples in February: “Putting in the spiles [spigots] I
lean on the brace and bit, heaving to use all my weight to keep the metal spiral
angling upward into the tough tree. How astonishing, after the hole is bored,
that the sap glistens, quivers, begins to run freely.” Months later, “All in a one-
day seizure, cattails, fiddlehead ferns, and nettles up for the foraging. Nettle
soup for supper.”
What with all this, knowingly described—“foal” as a verb, “dropping,”
“spiles,” fresh nettle soup—plus “daily hauling water, mucking stalls [remov-
ing dung], paring hoof abscesses,” it ’s a wonder Kumin manages to write at all.
“
I