Three Of A Kind.

Three of us without a care     In the red September     Tramping down the roads of Maine,     Making merry with the rain,     With the fellow winds a-fare     Where the winds remember.     Three of us with shocking hats,     Tattered and unbarbered,     Happy with the splash of mud,     With the highways in our blood,     Bearing down on Deacon Platt's     Where last year we harbored.     We've come down from Kennebec,     Tramping since last Sunday,     Loping down the coast of Maine,     With the sea for a refrain,     And the maples neck and neck     All the way to Fundy.     Sometimes lodging in an inn,     Cosey as a dormouse--     Sometimes sleeping on a knoll     With no rooftree but the Pole--     Sometimes halely welcomed in     At an old-time farmhouse.     Loafing under ledge and tree,     Leaping over boulders,     Sitting on the pasture bars,     Hail-fellow with storm or stars--     Three of us alive and free,     With unburdened shoulders!     Three of us with hearts like pine     That the lightnings splinter,     Clean of cleave and white of grain--     Three of us afoot again,     With a rapture fresh and fine     As a spring in winter!     All the hills are red and gold;     And the horns of vision     Call across the crackling air     Till we shout back to them there,     Taken captive in the hold     Of their bluff derision.     Spray-salt gusts of ocean blow     From the rocky headlands;     Overhead the wild geese fly,     Honking in the autumn sky;     Black sinister flocks of crow     Settle on the dead lands.     Three of us in love with life,     Roaming like wild cattle,     With the stinging air a-reel     As a warrior might feel     The swift orgasm of the knife     Slay him in mid-battle.     Three of us to march abreast     Down the hills of morrow!     With a clean heart and a few     Friends to clench the spirit to!--     Leave the gods to rule the rest,     And good-by, sorrow!