When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai <br />in the gray rain, <br />in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, <br />he fell straight as a pine, he fell <br />as Ajax fell in Homer <br />in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge <br />the woodsman returned for two days <br />to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing <br />and on the third day he brought his uncle. <br /> <br />They stacked logs in the resinous air, <br />hacking the small limbs off, <br />tying those bundles separately. <br />The slabs near the root <br />were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; <br />the logs from midtree they halved: <br />ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood, <br />moons and quarter moons and half moons <br />ridged by the saw's tooth. <br /> <br />The woodsman and the old man his uncle <br />are standing in midforest <br />on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. <br />They have stopped working <br />because they are tired and because <br />I have imagined no pack animal <br />or primitive wagon. They are too canny <br />to call in neighbors and come home <br />with a few logs after three days' work. <br />They are waiting for me to do something <br />or for the overseer of the Great Lord <br />to come and arrest them. <br /> <br />How patient they are! <br />The old man smokes a pipe and spits. <br />The young man is thinking he would be rich <br />if he were already rich and had a mule. <br />Ten days of hauling <br />and on the seventh day they'll probably <br />be caught, go home empty-handed <br />or worse. I don't know <br />whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean <br />and there's nothing I can do. <br />The path from here to that village <br />is not translated. A hero, dying, <br />gives off stillness to the air. <br />A man and a woman walk from the movies <br />to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. <br />There are limits to imagination.<br /><br />Robert Hass<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/heroic-simile/
