100 WITH EARTH AND SKY 
zigzagged like genial lightning along his looks. 
He was in his shirt sleeves. Of course! Could 
a man be a poet-farmer and go around in his 
coat all the while? Preposterous! Say that 
word again, and say it louder. Adam never 
wore a coat. He went around with his shirt 
sleeves rolled up every day of his redolent year, 
sown to musk odors and dew-drench of the 
night and dawn. You don’t look like business 
with a trim coat on when you're going about 
poetastering in a paradise. You look like a 
clothing merchant, which won’t do for an out- 
of-doors poet. Nay, verily. More nay verilies. 
To be sure, he wore no cuffs. You can’t cuff 
your way to the proprietorship of multimiles of 
odorous orchard blooms. 
His hands were naked and dirty with the 
dirt in which trees root—good clean, undirty ditt, 
loved by all flowers, trailing arbutus, fuchsias, May 
apples, Solomon’s seals, prairie phlox, flowerless 
fronds of ferns, and wistful wild violets—that 
good dirt was on his hands; and his hands were 
brawny and masterful. When I shook hands 
with him I knew a man was owner of that right 
hand, hard at the palm, sinewy of fingers, dig- 
nified of labor, coworker with the ground and 
the sky, and the God of both to make the world 
beautiful in its season. It was a handsome 
hand, which if interpreted to mean “some hand,” 
the exegesis would be legitimate. It would be 
ridiculous even to think of that brawny, business 
