in the dooryard bloomed

Ms. Ulysses and I live in a hollow, a moderate ravine, a gap in the hills overlooking Ithaca. 350 years ago Cayugas lived here, in a village of longhouses on a spot chosen doubtless for the same reason later was built a mill and a covered bridge extant.
In the dooryard (pictographic form, above) eighty years ago, a family domesticated the scene. The house on the site was built just after 1865. When Hellhound the sheepdog and I go out to chase sticks and look down the valley half-lost in dreamy contemplation, roughened features pop up their heads through the years. Arrowheads, an apple tree, a blackberry bush, a raspberry bush, a chicken coop, granite boundary markers, a community of voles, forsythia, pine trees, a huge oak and the rotting stump of another oak that must have been enormous, bees, a creek, a rowstand of pines, a lilac bush. It is a frieze. An outbuilding houses my studio, where I produce art tiles (woodstove, electricity, church-like silence). In the house, the roof leaks; the chimney is doubtful; there is a 1903 Steinway on which La Vogdessa plays Gottschalk, Brahms, and Rhapsody in Blue, and another woodstove. In 1779 George Washington commanded John Sullivan to My Lai the persons living in this hollow; I have elsewhere seen the text translated from the English using the word "mischief."

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.