Bent birches among straighter darker trees suggest a boy swinging on them, though ice-storms are what bend them down to stay, loading them with ice after rain on sunny winter mornings until they click in the breeze, turn many-colored, and shed crystal shells onto the snow-crust in heaps like broken glass, leaving trunks arched for years. Yet the imagined boy remains preferable: a solitary child far from town, fetching cows and playing alone in summer or winter, riding his father’s birches down again and again until he learned how to climb carefully to the top branches, keep his poise, and fling himself outward to the ground. Remembering once being such a swinger, the speaker dreams of returning to that act when weary of life’s hardships, wishing to rise from earth for a while and then come back, because earth is the right place for love, and being set down again by a birch would make both the going and the return good.