The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin

A Twilight Hill

279 A Twilight Hill A grove I know, set circling like a crown, Of slanting oaks; it overlooks a town, And thence the hill front slopeth broadly down And gives a prospect fair. When days of spring draw lengthening to a close, The while from room to room the housewife goes With busy cares about the night’s repose, I love to linger there. It is the season when the waters sing, Green, misty censers do the grape vines swing, And at their thresholds birds are gossiping While holds the lengthening light. And here the blundering night-moth doth disclose The scented hollow where the currant grows, And there the musky bloom of gilia glows Like nuns at prayer, milk-white. Some beams still light the far, dark, tapered firs, A quail belated to its covert whirrs In nestling hollows where a warm wind stirs The lupines everywhere. The hill folk have no fear of such as I. The questing night hawk hurtles dauntless by, I hear the specked owlets hoot, and spy Their matings unaware. While lowing upward from the winding creek The warm, last-lighted slopes the cattle seek, Up climbs the dark along the jacinth steep, And every far hill glows Blue with the blue of seas encompassing, Divinely purpled to its outer ring, 280 In such uncounted hours remembering The sea from which it rose. Editor’s Notes Land of Sunshine, March 1901, 181. Austin’s manuscript note locates the hill above the arroyo between Los Angeles and Pasadena. ...