Old Jubal

by HERPERT MERRILL

THE only place I know where time stands still
Is Jubal’s farm on Stony Lonesome Hill.
He was an old man there when I was horn.
And on the day that Gabriel blows his born
He’ll still be there, to follow with persistence
Whatever lines remain of least resistance.

He owes his immortality, I guess,
To never doing more but doing less,
To rocking on the porch and rarely thinking
And only raising corn enough for drinking.
And to his notion that it takes less trying
To keep on living than to start in dying.