Class JH^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lto. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
GRANITE and ALABASTER 
 
 BY 
 
 RAYMOND HOLDEN 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1922 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
PBINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA 
 
 '9^'^tl'^'' 
 Q-^^-^^- 
 
 COPTRIQHT, 1922, 
 
 Bt the macmillan company. 
 
 Set up and printed. Published November, 1922. 
 
 di^. 
 
 NOV "i IJ22 
 
 ©Gi.AGS6600 
 
 Press of 
 
 1. J. Little & Ives Company 
 
 New York, U. S. A. 
 
 ^\^ I 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 Certain of the poems included in this 
 volume have appeared in the pages of Poetry 
 (Chicago), Contemporary Verse, The Forge, 
 The Survey, The Literary Review, The Mid- 
 land, The Nation, The Measure, Vanity Fair, 
 The Yale Review. Thanks are due the editors 
 of those publications for permission to reprint 
 in this volume. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Once 13 
 
 Sugaring 14 
 
 The Summit 17 
 
 Lost Wateb 18 
 
 Snow Rain 19 
 
 Borers 20 
 
 Burying Ground 21 
 
 Winter 22 
 
 The Plow 23 
 
 Mountain 24 
 
 Ghostly Retrospect 26 
 
 To the North Wind 27 
 
 Spring Building 30 
 
 Night Above the Tree Line 33 
 
 Firewood 35 
 
 Prospect 36 
 
 Mood 37 
 
 Promontory 38 
 
 The Passenger Pigeon 41 
 
 Fishing 42 
 
 Snow 44 
 
 Winter Fire 45 
 
 Open Windows 48 
 
 The Woodman 49 
 
 ix 
 
X CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Life 50 
 
 Growth 51 
 
 Afteb the Circus 52 
 
 Season's End . 54 
 
 Rock Fowler 55 
 
 After Twenty Years 67 
 
 Memorial 69 
 
 Autumn 1918 70 
 
 February Twenty-second 71 
 
 To the De.\d 72 
 
 Senses 73 
 
 Flesh 74 
 
 Midnight: Battery Park 75 
 
 October 76 
 
 Walt Whitman . 77 
 
 To a Skylark 78 
 
 The Dissembling Look , 79 
 
 Advice 80 
 
 Different Streets 81 
 
 To THE Urbane 82 
 
 Early Flowers 83 
 
 Illusion 84 
 
 The End of March 85 
 
 Paradox 86 
 
 The Ample Cloak 87 
 
 quatorzaine 88 
 
 Passers-by 89 
 
 Longshoreman 92 
 
 Soliloquy 93 
 
 Surrender . 95 
 
CONTENTS XI 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Shtreing 97 
 
 Bretonnb 98 
 
 Circe 100 
 
 Calypso 101 
 
 Windmill 103 
 
 Widow's Weeds 104 
 
 New Singing 105 
 
 Presence , 107 
 
 Dance 108 
 
 Reach Out 110 
 
 You and I Ill 
 
 Epithalamium 112 
 
 Storm 115 
 
 Nocturne 116 
 
 Words 117 
 
 The Durhams 118 
 
GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 ONCE 
 
 Once there was silt and gravel everywhere 
 And water running in great roaring floods — 
 No feet on earth nor wings upon the air 
 Nor any green that could have promised buds. 
 There was a vast ice precipice withdrawing 
 Slower than snails to a glittering cold rest 
 About the uncertain pole while waters gnawing 
 At rigid rock made room for root and nest. 
 Then some ancestral cell now lodged in me 
 Went writhing gaily imder the glacier tongue 
 Pastured upon a wild uncertainty. 
 Now there are men. Life is no longer young. 
 Now there is warm flesh and warm vocal breath. 
 The only glacier is the shadow of death. 
 
 18 
 
SUGARING 
 
 A man may think wild things under the night 
 
 In March when there is a tapping within pails 
 
 Hung breast-high on the maples. Then the stars, 
 
 Washed by a wind that all day long 
 
 Lay in the sunny pastures of the thaw, 
 
 Shine like what eyes would be if men were gods. 
 
 Then the trees seem like rootlets sprung from earth 
 
 Into the fertile mold of the black air. 
 
 A man may think wild things under the stars 
 
 In March when gusty ground-winds stretch their veils 
 
 Across deep footprints in the hillside snow. 
 
 He may believe that life is beautiful 
 
 And will outlast all Autumns and all Winters. 
 
 He may believe that his warm body is one 
 
 With rock and root and iron-fingered frost 
 
 And that its happy power is like the sap 
 
 The subject of inevitable rise 
 
 Timed by sure seasons, promised to the skies. 
 
 14 
 
SUGARING 15 
 
 n 
 
 Look I The mountain shoulders a weight of moon 
 
 Come from the many million miles of night 
 
 To move among these vapors which go up 
 
 And wind among the winds. The brown sap works 
 
 Its foamy bulk over a great log fire. 
 
 Colors of flame light up a man who kneels 
 
 With sticks upon his arm and in his face 
 
 A grimace of resistance to the glow. 
 
 The very world is burning, though it be March, 
 
 With a wild flame which stirs the life of trees 
 
 Here in the vat and the blood in a man's heart. 
 
 Out there among the roots thaw-runnels make 
 
 The only music heard above the sway 
 
 Of branches fingering the falling silver. 
 
 The fierce flames roar and the embers settle down 
 
 Slowly into that darkness which sends a man 
 
 Up and away to sleep a tired sleep 
 
 And dream of dripping from a rotting roof 
 
 Back into sap that once was rid of him. 
 
 ni 
 
 Close the iron doors and let the fire die 
 
 And the faint night-wind blow through the broken walls. 
 
 The sugar thickens and the moon is gone 
 
 And frost threads up the singing rivulets. 
 
 I am going up the mountain toward the stars 
 
16 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 But I should like to lie near earth to-night, 
 
 Earth that has borne the furious grip of Winter 
 
 And given a kind of birth to beauty at last. 
 
 Earth! The old breath thrills through her once again 
 
 And there will be passion soon, shaking her veins 
 
 And driving her spirit upward till the buds 
 
 Burst overhead and swallows find the eaves 
 
 Of the sugar-house untroubled by the talk 
 
 Of men gone off with teams to mend the roads. 
 
 I think I shall throw myself down here in the snow 
 
 So to be very near her when she stirs — 
 
 Near to the throbbing of this body of hers. 
 
THE SUMMIT 
 
 Here where a man seems in the grip of hands 
 
 Which reach up out of the indistinct below 
 
 As if to drag him from the place he stands 
 
 Into a blue gulf where the tree-tops flow 
 
 And straighten and ebb the weathered peak is worn, 
 
 As if from too much cleaving of the sky, 
 
 To a crumbling blade whose temper storms have borne 
 
 Down to give breadth to meadows where cows lie. 
 
 So the interminable change goes on 
 
 Always among the most established things. 
 
 The vast snow pinnacles which were here are gone 
 
 Beyond the reach of even eyes or wings 
 
 And man stands on the ridges which remain 
 
 Feeling the earth dissolving in its rain. 
 
 17 
 
LOST WATER 
 
 It is a doubtful noon under these trees, 
 
 And I am digging in the stony sand 
 
 Among the roots of what a little since 
 
 Were blue and yellow flags and now are pods. 
 
 Deeper and deeper, and the depth is cool 
 
 And forest sounds are soft as a man's breath. 
 
 Old pines have done old apple trees to death 
 
 And stiffening silence is upon them now. 
 
 The sun and I are looking for the sweet 
 
 Quiet waters of the rocky veins of earth 
 
 In leaf and root and where mold-bitten staves 
 
 Remember lips that drank of cups now broken 
 
 And the time when buttercups were mirrored here 
 
 Where now there is a masonry of crusted leaves. 
 
 It is a doubtful noon under the pines 
 
 That press their fingered tops to the low sky, 
 
 A doubtful noon, a doubtful world, and I . . • 
 
 18 
 
SNOW RAIN 
 
 I am not one to mind the rain when it comes 
 
 Fingering the sinking snow and leaving prints 
 
 Of passage heard to tell from the touch of grass 
 
 Bent by a rabbit's frenzy or the wind. 
 
 Days like to-day there is something very near 
 
 Always upon the point of breaking through. 
 
 Men of the mountain towns in the milk-train 
 
 Quicken the air with tales of leaping deer 
 
 And myths of caribou gone fifty years 
 
 Come back to visions straining beyond sight. 
 
 Something of me goes out into their talk 
 
 For I have lain upon the quiet snow 
 
 Watching for flying feet and listening 
 
 For the murmuring trees to burst with sudden wings, 
 
 And I have felt the drops, as they fall now 
 
 Come down almost in passion for a world 
 
 Made beautiful by the presence of glad men. 
 
 Even now I think there is something very close 
 
 Ready to sweep like rainfall over me, — 
 
 These men, the lingering patterns of the snow, 
 
 The wet that alters them, the purple river, 
 
 I climb upon these things almost to touch 
 
 The beauty of that power I almost know. 
 
 19 
 
BORERS 
 
 The red-nosed grubs that burrow under bark 
 
 Of pines too old to earn their daily sunlight 
 
 Have come from some place which is very dark 
 
 In the imaginings beyond my eyes. 
 
 I hear them munching in their paradise 
 
 Of many cells steeped in still-running sap. 
 
 I lie half-dozing in the patchy sunlight 
 
 And if it were not for ants I should have a nap. 
 
 But I do not care to think the world is dying 
 
 Slow death from mouth to mouth of things that creep 
 
 Or spread where lack of sun means never drying 
 
 For I am not really sure that now and then 
 
 Some sudden glance of some one among men 
 
 Could fail to find me sullied, no, not sure, — 
 
 Not sure enough to lose the ants and sleep. 
 
 There are only times when earth and I are pure. 
 
 20 
 
BURYING GROUND 
 
 There is nothing here but the elms for me to speak to 
 
 And so I say, Why do you draw yourselves 
 
 Upward away from these poor planted people 
 
 Who would be forgotten but for their stones? 
 
 Small need I have to ask that of the elms 
 
 For I myself am only passing by 
 
 With the dust and the wind and the seeds of pines, 
 
 Knowing that there is no stone waiting here 
 
 For me to come and burrow under it, 
 
 No stone to mark me different from the elms 
 
 That give the earth to the sky. 
 
 21 
 
WINTER 
 
 Drowsily, dreamily, the brown boughs 
 
 Mingle and murmur in the breeze 
 
 And the little animals drowse 
 
 And I wonder they do not freeze, 
 
 For nothing moves but is shrill 
 
 With the Winter's clinking song 
 
 And the snow lies deep and the hill 
 
 Gleams where the gusts are strong. 
 
 I have come down from the house 
 
 Which rests on the reaching snow 
 
 To the music of murmuring boughs 
 
 In the footless world I know, 
 
 And to me the cold is a voice 
 
 From earth that would speak to me 
 
 And urge me not to rejoice 
 
 That I am not beast nor tree; 
 
 And to me the warmth of my blood 
 
 Is an answer saying, "I hear," 
 
 And so we are understood 
 
 And so we have nothing to fear 
 
 Though I am a man who dies 
 
 And the earth is like dust in the skies. 
 
 22 
 
THE PLOW 
 
 I thought the white patch on the Eastern hill 
 Was surely snow. I watched it and it stirred, 
 And even the drifted uplands lost the chill 
 They had been blowing downward and a bird 
 Flashed blue and there were others which I heard. 
 
 n 
 
 The patch of snow moved with a man behind it 
 And furrows on the hillside rippled brown. 
 The Winter went like water from my mind 
 And the misty April sun came faintly down 
 And I forgot the road which leads to town. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I was not anything but one desire 
 To follow in the wake of the billowy blade 
 With wind and water and my kind of fir&— 
 To cleave the fallow hillside and invade 
 Young earth and rise up glad and unafraid. 
 
 23 
 
MOUNTAIN 
 
 Over the yellow tops of tamaracks 
 
 The dusk floats. Up the valley wild ducks fly 
 
 With light from the gone sun upon their backs. 
 
 Across the torrent, cloaked in purple sky, 
 Endowed with the sure silence a man lacks, 
 A mountain rises, grave and great and high. 
 
 Oh, Mountain I Island in a sea of change! 
 
 What starry vault of the cathedral air 
 
 Can house the murmurs of those prayers which range 
 
 Up from my blood toward you, who triumph there 
 Over the powers which have kept man strange 
 To what earth, fire, and wind and water share? 
 
 Sea-currents shifted sands and you were piled 
 Above the unbroken shimmer of the sea 
 And taking power and person from the wild 
 
 Warm sun, you shook your rocky shoulders free 
 
 And the waters fell and tempests came and filed 
 
 Your great shape to this glory which I see. 
 
 24 
 
MOUNTAIN 25 
 
 But I, the foundling fire upon your slope, 
 
 Remember nothing of my lineage. 
 
 I have been taught by wandering troops of hope 
 
 And I know nothing. Snow-berry and saxifrage 
 Rest tired roots in your heart but my roots grope 
 At earth and sun and rain and wind that rage 
 
 And find them all inapprehensible. 
 
 Oh, take me up to your dusk-vaulted walls 
 
 Or fall and silence this loud steeple-bell 
 
 Of shadow-vaulted flesh, this bronze that calls 
 
 To the unguided, unremembering swell 
 
 Of a lost air through which a lost star falls! 
 
GHOSTLY RETROSPECT 
 
 Through spruces lightened by a flash of birch 
 
 Foot over foot soft toe-pads patter down. 
 
 Grim little beasts go silently in search 
 
 Of birds whose odors linger though they have flown. 
 
 Even the sun is stealthy as it falls 
 
 Down through the darkness and the wind seems full 
 
 Of spectral breaths from the kind of life which calls 
 
 To the hungry mouse and the towering horned bull. 
 
 I walk on stones in the shadow of steel and glass 
 
 But I remember earth as it once was, 
 
 So that the look of men and girls that pass 
 
 These eyes which feed what senses a man has 
 
 Is animately strange, as if it were sight 
 
 Of sleek beasts slinking through a jungle night. 
 
 26 
 
TO THE NORTH WIND 
 
 No wash of the twelve-silvered earth's long flight, 
 
 No frosty fury warring with sun gold 
 
 Brings you to blow from the black-breasted night 
 
 Wind of the North I Tide of this sea of birch 1 
 
 You are the rich, uncoveted delight 
 
 Given to those mad men who madly hold 
 
 Close to their hearts throughout their short-houred search 
 
 That faithful fire which keeps them from the cold 
 
 Of meshy lanes through which the planets lurch. 
 
 n 
 
 By night, when the inevitable shade 
 
 Climbs from our roofs up cloud-stairs zenithward 
 
 And hangs in heavy sweeps from blade to blade 
 
 Of many-sworded stars, with you at heart 
 
 I wander from the waterside parade 
 
 Through a silence of small alleys, window-starred. 
 
 The cobbles speak to me, lamp fingers part 
 
 Shadows like veils. I whom my reasons guard 
 
 From swift surprise look up toward you and start. 
 
 27 
 
28 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 ni 
 
 Drawn by your presence flowing in the air, 
 Urged by the ancient mission of my veins 
 I enter the last door. A radiance there 
 Bright as the loveliest planet of the seven 
 Disarms the sad mask of the sense I wear, 
 Leaps from the stillness of the place and strains 
 My body to its beauty. A glad heaven 
 Dawns in the dusk, dispels the mind's black pains 
 And fills me with more fire than fills suns even. 
 
 IV 
 
 Then the auroral prominences fade, 
 
 Lifting their roots from out my burning breast, 
 
 Folding their flames that seared the senseless shade 
 
 Behind my eyes. Then I arise and go. 
 
 Far overhead the planet undismayed 
 
 Swims with slow splendor toward its heavenly West. 
 
 I from the happy regions where you blow 
 
 Fall downward, desolate and dispossessed, 
 
 Into those ways which there are none below. 
 
 Lean downward from your station in the sky, 
 Beloved Beauty! Sweet Crepuscular 
 Young Goddess of the silver-passioned eye! 
 Lean down and touch me, take me if you will ! 
 
TO THE NORTH WIND 29 
 
 I am a wanderer, a strange passer-by. 
 
 You with your young-mouthed laughter want a star. 
 
 I am a wanderer gathering coals to fill 
 
 A dead star-body. I have wandered far. 
 
 Here is my orbit ended, on this hill. 
 
 VI 
 
 Forgive me the futility of hands. 
 Forgive me the lit fires that have gone cold, 
 Forgive me this frail skeleton that stands 
 Against the sky, the shadows it keeps making! 
 You who are regent of what man commands 
 When beauty's torture drives him to be bold, 
 Forgive him the brief loves his life keeps taking 
 To save the want of you from growing old! 
 Forgive his senseless tears and his soul's aching! 
 
SPRING BUILDING 
 
 At noon the sound of hammering dies and wind 
 Scatters loose shingles from the untended gable. 
 The carpenter at the door-frame, grizzle-skinned 
 And gaunt, spits brown as far as he is able. 
 He steps across the mud upon a stone 
 Where, with an elbow and an arm at rest, 
 He sits, half quiet. He is not alone. 
 I watch him as he leans against the West. 
 
 n 
 
 Not from the carpenter, but from the things 
 Men never know of men I look away. 
 And where I look a massive mountain flings 
 Dark rocky fingers tipped with rosy gray 
 Up through its snowy mantle at a sky 
 Steeled to a perfect temper of keen blue. 
 The breath of a thin wind blows faintly by, 
 More warm, more lovely now than hitherto. 
 Not so much at the peak as at the things 
 I know of it I look through the noon ease, 
 
 30 
 
SPRING BUILDING 31 
 
 Made wistful by near songs and nearer wings 
 And runnels of singing water and sighs from trees. 
 Not sharply, but through distances and veils 
 I wonder at what earth's elements arrange; 
 The rock, the tree, the flesh and blood that fails. 
 I wonder where in this evolving change 
 I stand that life burns so in breast and limb. 
 I wonder, and in the wake of wonder fear 
 Comes with its rapture to that mind, grown dim 
 With safety which so blindly led me here. . . . 
 Here where the forest waits its time for falling 
 And mountains feed their power to little streams 
 And after dark the hungry beasts go calling 
 And last year's leaves lie rotting in sun-beams. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Now I stretch out my arms in ravishment, 
 Or would but for the near-by carpenter, 
 Toward that old mountain in devout dissent 
 From too much human triumph, too much stir 
 Of the absurd infinitesimal 
 Before my eyes. I stretch out eager arms 
 At least in spirit, and the great ice-fall 
 Which once lay thick above these valley farms 
 Seems like a living thing, and the vast sea 
 Whose silty shifting piled these pinnacles 
 Heaves once again in deep tides over me 
 Sweeping strange pain with passionate old swells 
 
32 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Up from my heart to islands in my eyes. 
 Now I submit to what I ahnost know 
 And laugh in hope of being so made wise 
 Because I too survived that long ago 
 Gestation and am now a man who hires 
 Others to raise my walls and lay my sills 
 And bring me food and scuttle out my fires 
 Under the watchful silence of these hills. 
 
NIGHT ABOVE THE TREE LINE 
 
 You berries that are full of the dark dusks 
 Of mountains and the moisture of chill dews, 
 Swell on your stems and break your ripened husks 
 For lips which it would wither you to lose — 
 If there are lips to what is wandering here 
 Feeling you underfoot in the rocky night, 
 Moving about like wind, blowing you clear 
 Of mists, hanging your leaves with drops of light. 
 
 n 
 
 Listen! There is a sound of water falling 
 
 Down the dark shafted night into the trees. 
 
 Wild birds that should be quiet now are calling. 
 
 How shall I sleep to-night, troubled with these? 
 
 The cool wind through the moon's invisible strings 
 
 Blows like a striking of clear silver bars; 
 
 The great black peak shudders and leaps and swings 
 
 And I am blinded by the fall of stars. 
 
 33 
 
34 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 m 
 
 I cannot rest. I cannot quiet my limbs. 
 A sense of climbing keeps my body burning 
 And the white flame sweeps over me and dims 
 All that inclines within me toward returning. 
 Did I see only earth once long ago 
 And only flesh in faces turned to me? 
 Sleep? Rest? With my senses shaken so 
 And the world's valleys lost so dizzily? 
 
 IV 
 
 Why have I come so near the fearful stars 
 When what is in me is so much a want 
 Of utter dark too thick for any wars 
 Of flesh and spirit dazzlingly to haunt? 
 I do not know. I do not want to know ; 
 Only to make a fire of weariness 
 And fling myself upon it and burn and go 
 Thinly, like smoke, to wind-walled quietness. 
 
FIREWOOD 
 
 The glittering crescent of my blade 
 
 Is stuck with juices of the tree: 
 
 There is the wound which I have made, 
 
 There are the dark boughs over me. 
 
 I swing the axe. The cones are shaken 
 
 And the shuddering tree begins to come 
 
 With ripping shrieks which might awaken 
 
 The gorged fox in his hidden home. 
 
 My blood is brightened and my eyes 
 
 Are blurred with flashes of a fire 
 
 That leaps like wind and only dies 
 
 When I have cut what I require. 
 
 The fresh chips falling in the snow 
 
 Have something for the sunny wind 
 
 Which rose a little while ago 
 
 In the old spruce forest I have thinned, 
 
 And I whose cheeks can feel it blow 
 
 Rest aching hands upon my axe 
 
 And have a desperate wish to know 
 
 What kind of flame my chimney lacks . . . 
 
 Why covet skeletons for food 
 
 To keep a man from stiffening 
 
 With cold not made to chill the blood 
 
 Of fox's foot or bird's wing. 
 
 35 
 
PROSPECT 
 
 The eagle hangs so close I see a stir 
 
 Of ragged feathers fronting the strong wind 
 
 And in the blue beyond where my limbs were 
 
 This very morning, colors strangely thinned 
 
 With downward distance which are intervals 
 
 Full of green stands of grass and pastures cropped 
 
 By much diminished cattle, threads of walls 
 
 And shiny runs of streams that seem to have stopped. 
 
 Only the steady eagle is above me 
 
 Hanging in the wind that goes blowing by. 
 
 It is as if the earth were trying to shove me 
 
 Like a finger upward into the tall sky. 
 
 And I could be the finger but for a strange 
 
 Disturbing taciturnity in the mass 
 
 Of living forest, a silence in the change 
 
 Of light across it where cloud shadows pass 
 
 Which seems to mean, What can a man point out, 
 
 A man whose blood is watered so with doubt? 
 
 36 
 
MOOD 
 
 Some things make issue of the loveliest hours 
 And mar the lightest leisure. These are dead. 
 White wings of evening fold among the flowers 
 And winds attach me to them. I am led 
 Up where the birches shake in the sun's glow 
 And hemlocks watch their wavy shadows grow. 
 
 I am forgotten. The lit solitude 
 Effaces all my lineaments and name. 
 Life is among my limbs, and where I stood 
 Stands an unbodied rapture gone to flame. 
 Some things make issue of attained desire. 
 I do not know nor heed them. I am fire. 
 
 37 
 
PROMONTORY 
 
 On rocky islands half at sea 
 
 The derelict waters in a windy glare 
 
 Crash and are broken and drip dazzlingly. 
 
 The green kelp swirls like drowning hair 
 
 Lifting and falling with the tide. 
 
 The surf has a motion which shadows ride 
 
 As tree-boughs ride the air. 
 
 Shadows of cliff and shadows of cloud 
 
 Rise and fall with the sea 
 
 And wild winds heavy and loud 
 
 Clutch downward fearfully. 
 
 Against the earth a loom of waves and a whirr 
 
 Of sea-fowl banked like mist. 
 
 Against the sky a streaming stir 
 
 Of earth-blown clouds that belly and twist. 
 
 n 
 
 Man with his basket hunting nests 
 
 Moves through the high-tide spray 
 
 And the gulls with their stone-gray breasts 
 
 Flutter and glide away 
 
 38 
 
PROMONTORY 39 
 
 And the crossing shadows of their wings 
 Melt in the gullies and the moss. 
 What is it that in a man's heart sings 
 When the shadows cross? 
 When overhead the many million cries 
 Break loose from blood and bone 
 And the sea seethes toward the skies 
 And the crevice flowers are blown? 
 Man with his basket, hunting eggs, 
 Goes clambering with hands and legs 
 Over the rocks by the shore 
 In search of food, in want of more. 
 
 in 
 
 On rocky islands half at sea 
 
 The derelict waters rise and fall 
 
 Close fettered to their flow and never free 
 
 And the great sea of air from which birds call 
 
 Struggles within the limits of the wind 
 
 And the great world of stone and sand 
 
 And brown earth blown and thinned 
 
 Clings to its globe with many a rocky hand, 
 
 And birds of blowing wind invade 
 
 Dark waters, swift as falling stars, 
 
 For fish that swarm the weedy bars 
 
 Wide-eyed and afraid. 
 
 Men with their baskets hunting nests 
 
 Move through the high tide spray 
 
40 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Taking the wind and the mist to their breasts, 
 Frightening birds away. 
 
 IV 
 
 What is it that in a man's heart sings 
 
 When, with the thundering sea in his ears 
 
 And the breath of the great sky shrieking of fears 
 
 And the sharp earth bruising his feet, he brings 
 
 His basket over the cliffs and home 
 
 To mouths too sure that he will come? 
 
 Man the hunter of birds and beasts 
 
 That in their hunger hunt their kind 
 
 And crouch in their rock-homes over feasts— 
 
 A man's heart sings, but what of his mind? 
 
 How shall he know what it means to be 
 
 Master of wing and master of sea? 
 
 How shall he know, who has better than claws 
 
 To tear red flesh for hungry maws 
 
 Why he walks erect while the fox runs low? 
 
 Why he remains when the sea-birds go? 
 
 How shall he know why life goes around 
 
 Its circle above and underground 
 
 Through sea and sky, in flood and gale 
 
 Through feather and foot and fin and tail? 
 
 How shall he know man's destiny? 
 
 What shall he think himself to be? 
 
 How shall he walk by the strength of the sea 
 
 And hide his withered certainty? 
 
THE PASSENGER PIGEON 
 
 The dead and gone are not so ancient now 
 
 That there is no fluttering of their wild wings heard. 
 
 Still living travelers still remember how 
 
 They darkened long days' journeys when they stirred 
 
 By millions from woods broken by their wings 
 
 And how the beat and bustle of their quests 
 
 Shut out the sound of all earth's other things 
 
 And the ground was soft with feathers from their breasts. 
 
 Now they are gone, even to the last lone pair, 
 
 And men who never knew them go their ways 
 
 With equal clamor and an equal air 
 
 Of riding in the saddle of docile days. 
 
 This that is like a street is like a wood 
 
 Broken by famished wings grown fierce for food. 
 
 41 
 
FISHING 
 
 Down the white water and the dark pool 
 
 Over the rocks the wind blows and the songs 
 
 Of birds with only half-discovered names 
 
 Wait for the wind in places which are cool. 
 
 How should I know whether the earth belongs 
 
 To me or I to earth when all the claims 
 
 We have on one another are blown away 
 
 And masks fall from the faces of all things 
 
 Strangely and suddenly and the light of day 
 
 CHmbs back to heaven in cloud-stepped clamberings? 
 
 I have come for a man's reason with hook and line 
 
 To trouble the swift water under the stones 
 
 Where wise trout flash their darkness, but as the wind 
 
 Blows warm through bodies of great trees, through mine 
 
 A passion blows, burning my very bones 
 
 And making flame of the dust that is in my mind. 
 
 This then, instead of fishing, is an hour 
 
 Of being one with earth, as if her quiet 
 
 Had taken the shape for which a young life aches 
 
 In heart and mind, as if for leaf and flower 
 
 There were half-hidden limbs and for the riot 
 
 Of river water such riot as blood makes 
 
 In flesh that touches beauty long desired 
 
 42 
 
FISHING 43 
 
 And for the song of birds a whispering 
 From cool lips wet like petals and inspired 
 With needless music, for the wandering 
 Of shadow-footed clouds an altering 
 Of shadows in the brain, a moving on 
 Of darkness into seasons long, long gone. 
 
SNOW 
 
 Last night a brooding cloud 
 Of undecided mist 
 Lay on the mountain pasture 
 And the brooks were loud. 
 
 Now running waters lie 
 Faint as far bells 
 Under a soft white silence 
 And the birds ask why. 
 
 44 
 
WINTER FIRE 
 
 Neither the moon beyond the sill 
 
 Nor any flaming of this fire 
 
 Touches at all. The night is still. 
 
 The last spruce lifts a shadowy spire; 
 
 And there are stars. They may be shaking — 
 
 Lurching through orbits mad with storm — 
 
 But light from them comes faintly breaking 
 
 Against the world and is not warm. 
 
 Everything seems far away. 
 
 Even my heart, so wildly beating, 
 
 Seems as remote as yesterday 
 
 And all its sea of life retreating 
 
 In ripples from a littered beach 
 
 Not even waves can any longer reach. 
 
 n 
 
 Oh, false, false world of shamefaced solitude I 
 Cold house of shell I carry like a snail! 
 If I should rise and rush into the wood 
 Would you rise up and follow me or fail? 
 
 45 
 
46 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 There the white body of the moon lies bare, 
 
 Bathed by the shining stream of many a star 
 
 And if I hasten I shall find her there, 
 
 Her silver limbs looped in what winds there are. 
 
 What would it be if I were not afraid 
 
 To know t^at her beauty sheathes a bitter blade 
 
 Tempered by terror whitened to delight? 
 
 Would you dissolve and yield me to the night? 
 
 in 
 
 Too much afraid of even the star's fire 
 
 I have too long sat watching. The flame falls, 
 
 And happy heralds of unwise desire 
 
 Beat with their hands and heart-beats at my walls. 
 
 I hear the tongues of many vivid trees 
 
 In mouths of the mysterious dusk go crying 
 
 At doors and windows which converge on these, 
 
 My body's channels, that should be replying. 
 
 How can you hold me dumb, you strange chill thing? 
 
 How can your icy roots invade a heart 
 
 Taught by wild voyages to climb and sing 
 
 Nearest the sun where all heart burnings start? 
 
 IV 
 
 What matter? Fling aside the doors 
 And let the snow come rushing in. 
 Drift it deep upon the floors. 
 
WINTER FIRE 47 
 
 Pile it high where I have been! 
 I shall rise and strip me bare 
 And tear the snow- veils from the West. 
 They are warm enough to wear, 
 They have wrapped the moon's breast. 
 They are lovely I They will thaw 
 Rivers frozen in my veins, 
 Seas for tidal stars to draw. 
 Lakes for suns to suck for rains. 
 I shall wear the snowy mist 
 And with strength I never had 
 Leap and lie down, fiercely kissed, 
 By the stranger and be glad. 
 
OPEN WINDOWS 
 
 The grackle in the pavement tree 
 Creaks news of Northward airs 
 And human voices come to me 
 By other ways than stairs. 
 
 The curtains stir in winds that touch 
 Like ministering hands; 
 The murmurings of Spring are such 
 One almost understands. 
 
 48 
 
THE WOODMAN 
 
 Who is the dark, deep-chested fool 
 That tends my body's hearthstone 
 And will not let the red bricks cool? 
 Who can he be that walks alone 
 Through forests in my mountain heart 
 Piling the great logs in his cart? 
 
 All through the night I lie and hear him 
 
 Felling wonderful tall trees. 
 
 His tread is heavy and I fear him, 
 
 Yet by the gleam he furnishes 
 
 I read the writing on the wall 
 
 Traced by his shadow, dark and tall. 
 
 4g 
 
LIFE 
 
 In crotchy trees the worms weave 
 A dreadful house of gray 
 And there they live by no one's leave 
 To writhe the hours away. 
 
 And there they spin their silences 
 Hour after quiet hour 
 Unseen, unheard, in happy trees 
 Busy with fruit and flower. 
 
 Until one Summer a tree lacks 
 Green leaves to look upon 
 The farmer with his final axe 
 Finds all its young heart gone. 
 
 50 
 
GROWTH 
 
 Long, long ago a host of wonders were 
 
 Articulate about me — little birds 
 
 In branches bright with bloom, the happy words 
 
 Of waters falling, the unceasing stir 
 
 Of windy oaks against the ancient sky, 
 
 Blue gentians growing in unshadowed places. 
 
 Green willows and quiet cows and farm-boys' faces, 
 
 Loud wagons on the highway rolling by, — 
 
 All these were part of something I have lost 
 
 Among new, breathless hours grown heavily 
 
 Tumultuous, that will not let me see 
 
 Through other windows than these white with frost 
 
 Of too much Winter, the impassioned light 
 
 Which once gave things I met with their delight. 
 
 51 
 
AFTER THE CIRCUS 
 
 I can remember how the memory 
 Of fat-hipped women and strong chalky horses 
 And men in red and gold hung heavily 
 From rafters in my eyes, how other forces 
 Recruited among peanuts and popped corn 
 Marched in my middle. I remember now 
 A miserable sense of having worn 
 Too small a hat, so that my dizzy brow 
 Reeled in the settling dust behind the mare 
 From town to home along the river breezes 
 Inflamed by blasts of trumpets and the glare 
 Of white lights hanging among high trapezes. 
 Yet, for relief, I have still more in mind 
 How a great bird I never hoped to see 
 With wings like winds of storm that beat me blind 
 Flew up and startled both the mare and me. 
 So great the power of its sudden flight 
 The very day was altered and my brain 
 Burst from its bonds and followed the sloped light 
 On through the maples to the bird again. 
 And then the look of clowns and the blare of brass 
 Was gone and something came to the road's edge 
 
 52 
 
AFTER THE CIRCUS 53 
 
 And the breath of it blew petals to the grass 
 
 And it took me in its arms and sang a pledge 
 
 I have not yet forgotten into me. 
 
 So much for circuses or for any event. 
 
 The coming away is the reality. 
 
 The coming to one's self is what is meant. 
 
SEASON'S END 
 
 This is the end of the Summer. 
 This is the end of all. 
 The sap is running back into earth 
 And the red leaves shudder and fall. 
 
 If I could shake myself down 
 From the stem that has ceased to flow, 
 Would there be a cool dark earth to close 
 Round the things I have come to know? 
 
 54 
 
ROCK FOWLER 
 
 A weary man with Winter in his eyes 
 
 Though it is but September by the skies 
 
 Leans on his axe and rests. The afternoon, 
 
 Clear blue above but for a visible moon, 
 
 Touches the hills with lips and leaning breasts 
 
 Such as a man imagines, when he rests, 
 
 To approach the burning body of his dream. 
 
 Over the West there is a fiery gleam. 
 
 The rosy mountain seems to ride a sea 
 
 Of valley shadow rippled with mystery. 
 
 Among the scant limbs of young tamaracks 
 
 A weary man leans on his weathered axe. 
 
 A passer-by upon the stony road 
 
 Calls from a creaking of malodorous load. 
 
 The wind stirs in a skeleton of maple 
 
 With fingers full of voices. A loose staple 
 
 Falls from a withered fence-post. A horse neighs. 
 
 A distant window catches the sun's blaze. 
 
 Earth, with its contours and ineffable hues 
 
 Seems to burst upward, undeterred by shoes. 
 
 And enter into the mind of him who stands 
 
 55 
 
56 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 At sullen ease with an axe-helve in his hands ; 
 
 And what the winds can see behind his eyes 
 
 Is doubt, even terror, burning ember-wise — 
 
 Doubt of the solemn silence and the wonder 
 
 Of this sure earth and the dome it travels under; 
 
 As if his thirty years had played him false, 
 
 Fed him with fear of things beyond his walls, 
 
 Stolen the strong laughter which could kill misgiving 
 
 And frozen the heart that fills the brain with living. 
 
 Rock Fowler is as free as wild things are 
 
 Of all but the fear of reaching for a star, 
 
 But there come moments to men so made free 
 
 When man seems an impossible thing to be; 
 
 When in a moment's rest from opiate work 
 
 Gray spiders crawl from places where they lurk 
 
 Across unsettled leaves, as fatefully 
 
 As ever dramatist sent mystery 
 
 To shadow settled things with shapes of meaning 
 
 And set the tower certainty to leaning. 
 
 So to a man half busy with green posts 
 
 A minute's rest is a minute full of ghosts — 
 
 Of fox-fires in the spirit's twilight bogs — 
 
 Ghosts that rise up within him from the logs 
 
 He has left lying in the path of peace 
 
 And from old roots whose bleeding will not cease. 
 
 Safe from the penetrating eyes of men 
 
 The trees seem subtle spies. What then? What then? 
 
 What is a man to do and where to go? 
 
 What trees may learn soon even dust will know. 
 
ROCK FOWLER 57 
 
 There was this morning when an old tramp strode 
 
 Drunk as a goatfoot satyr down the road 
 
 Wearing a feather in his ruined hat. 
 
 Now when he rests Rock Fowler thinks of that. 
 
 He lifts his axe and swings so bitterly 
 
 That dead twigs shower from the doomed young tree. 
 
 And yet the great tap-root of torturing doubt 
 
 Still clutches earth and sucks much power out. 
 
 Rock drops his axe again and wipes his brow 
 
 And wonders what the tramp is doing now 
 
 And why the comic spectacle, being gone, 
 
 Still fills his mind like something to be done 
 
 Which frightened voices warn him of and cry, 
 
 "Life is a hurt. Avoid its avid eye!" 
 
 The pine trees shiver with a sudden sigh 
 
 And rosy clouds range up the Eastern sky. 
 
 The ground leaves rustle and a sweet shrill bird 
 
 Blows silver and far off and faintly heard 
 
 A grouse booms and small squirrels crash through seas 
 
 Of drifted leaf at ebb tide among trees. 
 
 Rock takes his axe and wanders toward his shack 
 
 Half fearing lest the tramp be coming back 
 
 To storm the citadel of his reserve 
 
 By being something he should have to serve. 
 
 He hurries clumsily along the road 
 
 As if he were a horse which terror strode 
 
 And gripped and guided with relentless knees 
 
 Toward what it is that no man ever sees. 
 
 No print but pressure of the footless wind 
 
58 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Flattens the grasses at his door. Behind 
 
 The blistered panes no things but shadows loom. 
 
 Nothing but silence paces the muffled room. 
 
 Rock enters and starts echoes from the floor. 
 
 He flings his axe in the corner by the door 
 
 And lights the stove and stretches out his hands. 
 
 A shaft of vanishing sun strikes where he stands 
 
 Through the blue stove-smoke. He averts his eyes, 
 
 Afraid of what that sunlight might surprise. 
 
 n 
 
 A leaf moves in the wind from shade to shade 
 
 And timid trees withdrawn into themselves 
 
 Whisper and worry. Winter has thrust a blade 
 
 Through creviced branches and their nested shelves 
 
 Trying the way to go. The watchful rabbit 
 
 Is changing coats with something hopefully, 
 
 As if the fox could never change his habit 
 
 Of looking for what rabbits used to be. 
 
 A short rod from the upper pasture, black 
 
 As water gathered in unfathomed pools, 
 
 There is a clump of spruce whose limbs drop back 
 
 And touch the mold so that the breath which cools 
 
 Their shadows buries their fingers with a drift 
 
 Of leaves and needles and the ground-vines weave 
 
 Above and under them and light ferns lift 
 
 Faces they cover with a sweep of sleeve. 
 
 Safe in this dark the gathered grouse sit sleeping 
 
ROCK FOWLER 59 
 
 Sure that for birds there is nothing else to do, 
 
 That hostile beasts with limits to their leaping 
 
 Such as could lose them grapes must lose grouse too. 
 
 A leaf moves and there comes a sudden scrape 
 
 Of strong wings moving against flaky bark, 
 
 Then silence. Then the tree-tops take on shape 
 
 And visibly move across the upper dark 
 
 To the measures of the wind. There comes a chatter 
 
 Of squirrels shaking in their strange red rage 
 
 Aware of something ominous in the patter 
 
 Of needles upon leaves grown shrill with age. 
 
 Now it is lighter out beyond the trees 
 
 Than the cock grouse who stands on a spruce root 
 
 As motionless as stone. A rabbit sees 
 
 The shadowed shape and halts with lifted foot. 
 
 Then something on the wind or in the light 
 
 Infusion of the dawn dissolves their fear. 
 
 The rabbit drops and hurries out of sight 
 
 And the grouse, siu-e no danger can be near, 
 
 Lifts a slow foot and struts with neck and breast 
 
 In search of sunlight or a fall of seeds 
 
 Under a beech tree somewhere, or in quest 
 
 Of safe dark limbs for future roosting needs. 
 
 Suddenly from his peace among the ferns 
 
 The bird starts up and away with a burst of wings. 
 
 Is it the changing East which suddenly burns 
 
 With naked sun that makes him think of things? 
 
 Or is it something in that mossy hollow 
 
 Still dark with shadow, too like the ghostly dread 
 
60 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Birds have of power which their wings must follow 
 
 Eventually to the level of the dead? 
 
 Something in black and gray like a fallen tree 
 
 Yet nothing like a tree because of a hand 
 
 Full stiffly of dried moss which used to be 
 
 Part of a green where lichen trumpets stand 
 
 Delicately now at the foot of a sloped beam 
 
 Of morning sun on the billowed floor. ... Is this 
 
 The source of that which forces winds to seem 
 
 Awful and anguished? And if not what is? 
 
 How shall the forest know, when suddenly 
 
 The moment passes and the stately bird 
 
 With grave feet and high-throated dignity 
 
 Returns to the diligence his fear deferred? 
 
 How shall the forest tell, the forest which only 
 
 Speaks through its moving boughs and cracking twigs 
 
 Its usual throats of creatures fierce and lonely 
 
 Its noise of crisp leaves dancing gusty jigs? 
 
 Or if it does, how shall the great grouse know 
 
 "Who mounts a log and spreads his splendid tail 
 
 And the ruffle at his throat, meaning to show 
 
 Through beauty the worthy wonder of the male? 
 
 He faces to the East and then to the West 
 
 As if there were some pattern in his brain 
 
 Of certain gestures, lifts his vivid breast 
 
 As once he did in April in the rain 
 
 For inattentive hens who turned their backs. 
 
 At a pose his prancing stops, his plumage settles. 
 
 He is quiet a moment while some far branch cracks 
 
ROCK FOWLER 61 
 
 And a late aster bends its pallid petals. 
 
 Nothing approaches. Up go pointed wings 
 
 To touch their tips above his delicate crown. 
 
 A strong stroke downward and the aster swings 
 
 More widely, and then up and again down 
 
 Faster and faster thumping the slow air 
 
 Till the forest booms and rasps with scraping bark 
 
 And leaves which lay in a tense stillness there 
 
 Leap up and scatter in many a windy arc. 
 
 It seems almost as if the tree-tops drew 
 
 More vivid circles across the upper sky 
 
 Because of what these frantic wing-tips do 
 
 To shake the trunks which twigs are anchored by. 
 
 Even when the boom of the last beat is done 
 
 And the bird struts again and silence floods 
 
 Mixed with the merry yellow of fresh sun 
 
 Back through the meshy branches of these woods 
 
 An echo of that strange strong drumming beats 
 
 Somewhere among the winds to measure time 
 
 Until new rise and fall of wings repeats 
 
 Its meaning and the cadence of its rhyme. 
 
 So while the shadow of the forest falls 
 
 Continually nearer to its piers, 
 
 The great cock at unmeasured intervals 
 
 Utters his mystery and far-off ears 
 
 Keep hearing dimly and half wondering 
 
 Perhaps in terror, and sharp breezes blowing 
 
 Keep weaving the sound into the songs they sing 
 
 With the call of crows and the sound of water flowing. 
 
62 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 If there is any hen that hears him now 
 She does not come nor even know his meaning. 
 From where she perches on her sweep of bough 
 She has an eye for nothing but the gleaming 
 Of pine seeds shaken by squirrels from their cones 
 And beech-nuts bursting from three-cornered burrs. 
 Perhaps she wonders why he shakes his bones 
 With passion which blows no sign of spark in hers. 
 No matter. He keeps rolling at his drum 
 Till suddenly, to silence listening, 
 Sounds other than of grouse or squirrel come 
 Other than even the creak of a crow's wing. . . . 
 Strange sounds of moving, not as creatures stir 
 Over soft moss and needles or under a limb. 
 But entering the world of feather and fur 
 Like sense of death grown audible and grim. 
 The stately bird folds his gray wings and leaps 
 Swiftly down to the ground and is lost in the tangle 
 Of twig and fern and a flight of others sweeps 
 Up and away at many a sudden angle 
 To safer windfalls where uneasily 
 They sit and watch with wide-eyed earnestness 
 Far shadows where the fearful thing may be 
 Half wishing they might dare to fear it less. 
 Nearer it comes. A strange enormous tread 
 Snapping green boughs that lie across its path 
 And shattering stiffened branches of the dead 
 In sullen strides of imminence and wrath. 
 Nearer and nearer. . . . Past the gullied hollow 
 
ROCK FOWLER 63 
 
 Where cold, clear water drips like melted moons. 
 
 Nearer . . . And a loud tide seems to follow . . . 
 
 Nearer . . . And overhead strange music croons. 
 
 Then at the other side of an old clearing 
 
 The great thing towers and the sloped sun glistens 
 
 On something in its arms. A rabbit fearing 
 
 Mad heart-beats more than this stands up and listens. 
 
 Up goes the gleam and then a peal of thunder 
 
 Bursts into smoke and bold broad wings that drummed 
 
 Music from winds and made the whole world wonder 
 
 Flap faintly till their last hope has succumbed 
 
 And they no longer stir light leaves to leap 
 
 Nor shoot the body's arrow from their bow. 
 
 They fall unfolded into depths of sleep 
 
 Colder and vaster than warm lives ever know. 
 
 m 
 
 Rock Fowler, with his teeth set like a vise, 
 
 Watches the dead bird with ferocious eyes. 
 
 A wing-tip shudders. He lifts up his gun 
 
 And blasts the quivering thing. The echoes run 
 
 Once more among dark ledges of the trees 
 
 Engulfing silence in a tide of breeze. 
 
 Man with his shot has won the forest world. 
 
 Nothing survives the heavy danger hurled 
 
 From shouldered steel, not even the strong-winged grouse 
 
 King of this region of sun-mottled boughs. 
 
 Dun feathers scatter. The king stirs no longer. 
 
64 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Man and bird have met and man is stronger. 
 
 Rock leaps a log and reaches for his prey, 
 
 Then stops, goes white, and snatches his hand away. 
 
 He gropes for foothold on a brink of fear 
 
 Which makes him struggle back yet holds him near 
 
 Where the dead grouse in stiffening repose 
 
 Points with the clutching fist of his strong toes 
 
 At other death dissolving in forest mold 
 
 With help of those swift ants who have and hold 
 
 The outer crust of earth and are the link 
 
 Between dark depths to which their tunnels sink 
 
 And heavens full of birds that swoop and feed 
 
 On many a march of their black antlered breed. 
 
 Rock drops his gun and pendulous terror swings 
 
 This way and that across his mind like wings. 
 
 And the blood rushing back into his brain 
 
 Kindles his eyes and lights the thing again. 
 
 He steps a little nearer as if afraid 
 
 Of what his tread set echoing down the glade. 
 
 He looks into the eyes in which the stir 
 
 Of spruce-crowns across sky is but a blur 
 
 Of thickening motion and knows who it is 
 
 Whose body lies there at the foot of his. 
 
 And he remembers what the body said 
 
 But yesterday, and how last night in bed 
 
 The memory lay beside him like a snake 
 
 Invisible and large and kept awake 
 
 To choke his skull with coils of chilly black 
 
 And writhe its moist tail up and down his back. 
 
ROCK FOWLER 65 
 
 Now that great serpent is at large once more 
 
 Here, amidst tranquil root and squirrel-store. 
 
 Rock bends to see, to touch if he should dare, 
 
 The fearful human thing stretched lifeless there. 
 
 All the high spirit of the million years 
 
 Of man's ascension through the flesh he wears 
 
 To what he is among the untutored beasts — 
 
 The crowned mind busied with more things than feasts, 
 
 The red heart rich with many a happy beat, 
 
 The shrewd swift fingers and adventurous feet — 
 
 All these have gone to make this broken one 
 
 Who shudders beside another in the sun. 
 
 He sees, as no small brain of any bird 
 
 Or any crawling beast man ever heard 
 
 Whistling or howling ever yet could see. 
 
 Not only a dead man but things to be — 
 
 Strange shadows of this death projected on 
 
 Through days no animal is sure will dawn. . . . 
 
 Shadows across Rock Fowler's frantic wandering 
 
 From house to hill, strange echoes in his pondering 
 
 Of simple meanings, things a man must meet 
 
 And have a solvent for or taste defeat 
 
 And go forever outlawed from all ease, 
 
 Frightened by mice and terrified by trees. 
 
 He sees these things which beasts could never see 
 
 And so is not a beast, for beasts are free 
 
 Of all that crashing in the wake of mind 
 
 Which comes to shatter the small peace men find. 
 
 So a man stands beside another dead 
 
66 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 And out of tumult in a troubled head 
 
 Distils a fiery fear and out of fear 
 
 A bulk of black bewilderment drawn near. 
 
 It shakes him as an axe-blow shakes a tree 
 
 And as the chips fall, so fall heavily 
 
 Hewn fragments of the bole a man's blind cells 
 
 By slow accretion build, through which there wells 
 
 Upward, like sap sublimed from subtle earth, 
 
 Into the mind what makes and mars its worth. 
 
 But far unlike a tree Rock Fowler falls 
 
 And like no shriek of branches are the calls 
 
 He tries to utter with lips full of leaves. 
 
 The earth gives and the patient earth receives. 
 
 The man who feared is without fear again 
 
 And valid now. A fox comes from his den 
 
 And sniffs the sullied air and lifts his throat 
 
 To rattle warning. Two great hawks that float 
 
 Too high for shadow utter their shrill cries 
 
 And look through dwarf trees where a dead grouse lies 
 
 Beside a leafy heap, where black ants pom* 
 
 From root to root across the piney floor 
 
 Busy transferring to devoted dust 
 
 By foot and fang, inspired with frantic lust, 
 
 The wanderer elements returning blind 
 
 From high adventure in the living mind 
 
 Where they made men who could not learn to live. 
 
 Open, you Earth, and take what men can give! 
 
AFTER TWENTY YEARS 
 
 189&-1918 
 
 The little hill this side the sun 
 Is piteously gray. 
 Its crevices no longer know 
 The feet of yesterday. 
 
 Loud mimicry of desperate war 
 With friends who stood for Spain 
 Is gone from these unaltered rocks 
 And will not come again. 
 
 Those gray victorious bows are gone 
 Which once we saw return 
 Midst whistles and resounding guns 
 From seas where noondays bum. 
 
 The little boys whose laughter leaped 
 
 To see them pass the piers, 
 
 Are lost to love for ships of war 
 
 Deep under twenty years. 
 67 
 
68 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Yet they have put their hearts away 
 And risen from the hours, 
 And some there are who ride the skies 
 And some who sleep with flowers. 
 
 And some remain, whose hearts are mute 
 On lips that may not sing. 
 Who wonder at the death of friends, 
 At battles and at Spring. 
 
MEMORIAL 
 
 Oh, Countrymen! What tears do we require 
 Who in the sight of uncreated suns, 
 Leaping brief lengths of lives from dust to dust. 
 Pause here to grieve that sap no longer runs 
 The tall stalks of young bodies one time thrust 
 Up through the flesh of women wanting sons? 
 How shall we save from earth's engulfing crust 
 The earthen body emptied of its fire? 
 
 If we must weep may ours be bitter tears 
 Called from the springs of body-bounded wells 
 To celebrate in sadness the rich dread 
 Of being wide-eyed children lost in the dells 
 Of forests tall as stars. Then let the dead 
 With ropes of wind ring warnings from harebells 
 For us, the wandering unshepherded, 
 Left to the wolfish mercy of our years. 
 
 69 
 
AUTUMN 1918 
 
 Lately the apples of a burdened bough 
 Were gathered from their place of withered grass, 
 Lately the stubble where the crows are now 
 Uplifted stalks in many a tasselled mass, 
 Lately the winds blew softly by coiled vines 
 Where now a white frost rims the harrow-lines. 
 
 Autumn again, and with a graver gray 
 Among the shuddering branches of still trees . 
 Eyes cannot see the leaves fall and be gay, 
 Thinking of fields more desolate than these; 
 Thinking of voices quieter than things dead 
 For the brief time that snow lies overhead. 
 
 70 
 
FEBRUARY TWENTY-SECOND 
 
 Suppose one never heard of Valley Forge, 
 And Washington were nothing but a name 
 Cut in the rock of some Virginian gorge 
 Where never anything but swallows came. 
 
 Suppose December on the Delaware 
 Had never known that bleeding, swift retreat. 
 To-day would be a day as others are 
 With less of colored bunting in the street. 
 
 And nothing would be absent from these trees 
 Which wait their changing, and the starling's song 
 Would be as happy and as harsh as these 
 Shrill notes the gray wind blows along. 
 
 And the careless music of fast-melting snows 
 Would ripple in the gutters and be gone, 
 And crocuses would follow, and the rose 
 Return, and the world go on. 
 
 71 
 
TO THE DEAD 
 
 NEW year's eve 
 
 We have not kept the faith, and will you know? 
 
 Under the cold calm of unhappy snow 
 
 Troubled by feet that still have ways to go? 
 
 We have not matched your enterprise 
 
 We have not dared to put earth from our eyes. 
 
 Forgive us, you who have the earth for skies. 
 
 The new year leaps from the black bones of the old 
 
 Into a gala night of manifold 
 
 Whistles and bells and gay hearts warm in the cold. 
 
 We have the torn world to let fall or lift, 
 
 We, who steal hot-eyed glances at the shift 
 
 Of passionate shoulders and the burning drift 
 
 Of flesh-fires among fellow celebrants. 
 
 Forgive us you whose flesh is done with wants. 
 
 We are too much our own inhabitants. 
 
 72 
 
SENSES 
 
 Men and women speak their words for Heaven, 
 I see them holding out their tambourines. 
 Senses are only five — If they were seven 
 I wonder if we should know what Heaven means. 
 
 I have a mind to ask, why follow them? 
 I have a mind to ask what news they have 
 Of flowers vanished from the shaken stem, 
 What news of God this side of the grave? 
 
 I have them all, touch, sight, speech, smell and hearmg 
 And yet I cannot tell what thing is here 
 Beneath this weight of flesh which I am wearing, 
 Nor what the heaven is which it draws near. 
 
 73 
 
FLESH 
 
 I am the maker of the shadow 
 With me the waters of the pond are dark 
 Waters of jonquil and willow 
 Waters of drifting cloud. 
 
 It is I who take the light 
 It is I who crush the flower 
 And I am the thing men see 
 Who search for the thing I hide. 
 
 74 
 
MIDNIGHT: BATTERY PARK 
 
 Neither a late moon nor the evening star 
 Lights the dark moving of the waters here; 
 Out of the silence the shrill turn of a car 
 And the lapping of waves under the pier. 
 
 The light of the street lamp cares not for the towers 
 Whose darkened windows rise into the dark, 
 Only for the late paths and the border flowers 
 Stirred by the harbor winds in the shadowy Park. 
 
 I have sought silences that are not my own 
 And I have almost found them here in the night 
 Where I may close my eyes and dare be alone 
 With what a man knows of music and of light. 
 
 75 
 
OCTOBER 
 
 Alexander Wilson, died Sept. 1919 
 
 How can I hold my purposes when the trees 
 
 Let fall their verdure and unbeauti fully 
 
 Pierce the October gravity of sky? 
 
 I feel an inward loss, looking at these. 
 
 And a friend of mine is dead whose ways I thought 
 
 Were something like the many leaves that make 
 
 Marvels of life from sun and rain they take — 
 
 Dead! And I shall not know him as I ought! 
 
 How can I hold my purposes when men die 
 
 Like scattering skeletons of withered green 
 
 In windy comers of the earth and lie 
 
 Too early quiet for far too long? I have seen 
 
 Truth in the trees and in the faces of men 
 
 But sometimes I think I shall never see it again. 
 
 76 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 1819-1919 
 
 His shining presence falls, 
 Come noon or midnight, 
 On meadows, in hallways. 
 Build no memorials, 
 There shall be sunlight 
 And life-blood always. 
 
 What his breath held is blown 
 From breasts of singers 
 And songless creatures. 
 Carve no didactic stone. 
 The cutter's fingers 
 Are his true features. 
 
 77 
 
TO A SKYLARK 
 
 OR ANY OTHER BIRD 
 
 At dawn from flower-fondled sleep you rise 
 By spirals, so they say, and in the skies 
 Exult and ride and from your throat let go 
 Sweet singing falls of ravishment which blow 
 Among earth's thunders and enwrapping airs 
 And pierce the little flesh which a man wears. 
 Ah, comfortable bird I If this is so 
 Study the sounds and syllables which flow 
 From all men's lips and, when you rise again 
 To-morrow or next year, sing back at men 
 In their own language. Say there is no merit 
 In using wings one cannot but inherit. 
 And ask what members man can use as well 
 And why he thinks that heaven and not hell 
 Is reached by envied flight, and why he sighs 
 At you on hungry business in the skies 
 And not at his own kind at his own door 
 Likewise employed and likewise hunted for 
 And likewise troubled much by storm and change. 
 Say that for man to envy birds is strange! 
 Rise up and sing and say things wiser still 
 But oh! fly high, for man is out to kill. 
 
 78 
 
THE DISSEMBLING LOOK 
 
 Is it so precious, 
 Is it so dear 
 That you must hide it 
 When I come near? 
 
 You know that I know 
 That under your furs 
 There's a warm body, 
 A bloom that stirs. 
 
 Why give me marble 
 When I want blood? 
 Why give me parched sand 
 When you've a flood? 
 
 May be you love to feel, 
 When I have passed, 
 Life blushing back again, 
 Safety at last. 
 
 79 
 
ADVICE 
 
 When you go down town 
 Turn and go back. 
 Only ahead of you 
 Is the sky black. 
 
 When you are back again 
 Turn and go down. 
 There is a darkness 
 At both ends of town. 
 
 When at the noon hour 
 You hurry somewhere 
 Take someone with you 
 Or the dark will be there. 
 
 When you are safe in bed, 
 Clock striking two, 
 Think, is there anything 
 Darker than you? 
 
 Then when you wake 
 
 Look for light in the Park 
 
 Or else keep so busy 
 
 You don't mind the dark, 
 80 
 
DIFFERENT STREETS 
 
 There was a little boy 
 
 Solemn as stone, 
 
 Who walked through my street 
 
 Always alone. 
 
 Once I came home 
 
 By a different way 
 
 At a different hour 
 
 Of a different day. 
 
 There was the little boy 
 
 Jubilant then, 
 
 Building wet snow 
 
 Into marvelous men. 
 
 Life is not always 
 
 Just what it seems. 
 
 Little old boys 
 
 Have happy young dreams. 
 
 81 
 
TO THE URBANE 
 
 Who cannot drink the wild winds 
 Must set dry lips to little pools. 
 Who cannot feed upon sun-fire 
 Must wait until the sun cools. 
 
 So raise your towering city walls 
 You miserable all! 
 Build strong roofs above yoiu* heads 
 To catch the stars that fall. 
 
 Stop your ears against the wind 
 Ward the great light from your eyes 
 Clothe the naked earth with cobbles 
 Tell old horses you are wise! 
 
 82 
 
EARLY FLOWERS 
 
 Mayflowers once and violets now 
 On sunny corners of the town; 
 April warmth upon a brow 
 Where the Winter winds have blown. 
 
 Tulip now, and daffodil 
 By the window in a bowl. 
 April! Spare one breath to fill 
 A Winter-shaken soul. 
 
 aa 
 
ILLUSION 
 
 Silver earth in a grove of slanting stars 
 
 Blooming and waving in heaven. 
 
 Moonlight over lonely wavering water, 
 
 Marriage of silver and pearl. 
 
 Have I lost life that this is beautiful 
 
 Beyond the memory of all living things . . . 
 
 The sullying squalor of breathing men and women, 
 
 The clamor of their ineffectual ways, 
 
 Life and the need of living, hunger and death? 
 
 Black against a dark sky lightened 
 
 The writhe of bending pines in the hands of the night. 
 
 The moon has sent chimseras to their caves. 
 
 Look! What is it that walks the singing Sound? 
 
 Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beats my heart 
 
 So high that I have forgotten the bitterness 
 
 Of searching a long street for it in vain 
 
 At noon of a rainy day. 
 
 84 
 
THE END OF MARCH 
 
 This is a sea of Southern sun 
 That in the fingers of the wind 
 Sweeps over us. The storms are done. 
 The Winter drifts are black and thinned. 
 Even the streets start violets, 
 Even the harried heart forgets 
 What Winter was, what living is. 
 
 Now, like the seedlings of last year. 
 Green little shoots of mortal souls 
 Reach for the soil. The sun shines clear. 
 Hyacinth roots grope down in bowls 
 As men grope at the days which pass. 
 The white roots thicken in their glass. 
 They have their limits, man has his. 
 
 85 
 
PARADOX 
 
 Roots of the green tree sucking at the dry- 
 Earth's crust are safe, wings wavering in wind 
 Are sure, for who has ever seen them die. 
 
 Though there be pith-gorged beetles in the bole 
 Though there be hunters crouching in a blind, 
 Leaf and wing serve tree-sense and bird soul. 
 
 Who then are these and am I one of them 
 
 Of whom men say, "When person pride is dead 
 
 You may be granted the adorning gem; 
 
 "When love is stilled you shall have the loveliest, 
 "Pull up your roots and you shall then be fed, 
 "Care nothing and ask nothing and die blessed.'* 
 
 86 
 
THE AMPLE CLOAK 
 
 I am forever treading on and tearing 
 The warmest garment which I wear, a thing , 
 As like the shape men keep inheriting 
 As fruit is like a tree when it is bearing. 
 Most of the alleys which I walk these days 
 Are narrower than my flesh and this together, 
 And mostly, when I venture out, the weather 
 Arranges torment for it a hundred ways. 
 Perhaps I may not keep it about me always 
 Although I am nothing but what it makes of me; 
 Perhaps I should leave it hanging in one of those hall- 
 ways 
 Frequented by whomever I need not be. 
 Perhaps there is a crack there or a hook 
 To catch and keep a piece. I shall go and look. 
 
 87 
 
QUATORZAINE 
 
 By the early light of our precarious lives 
 
 The rugged world seems colder than it is. 
 
 What do we see? This certainty and this, 
 
 Truths made of untruths which the truth forgives, 
 
 Figures of clay, imaginary shapes, 
 
 As real as stars, as shadowy as smoke, 
 
 Fears which unfounded knowledges evoke, 
 
 Joys and delights, we foxes and they grapes. 
 
 We foxes — hungry as in ^sop's fable, 
 
 That scamper off to a pretended world 
 
 Where no one knows that stones might well be hurled 
 
 At hanging fruit, where all are charitable 
 
 And flatter clever beasts for calling sour 
 
 The clustered vines that climb the ivory tower. 
 
 88 
 
PASSERS-BY 
 
 Mostly it is eyes that find me 
 And your eyes are gone. 
 Shoestrings I have little need of 
 For these shoes that bear me on. 
 So I let you fall behind 
 With other things 
 To which I am blind. 
 
 n 
 
 And you, my little friend of the gay dress! 
 In a swift moment of encountered eyes 
 I have touched your hand and kissed your wistfulness 
 And looked with you upon eternities, 
 And I know that neither the powder on your nose 
 Nor the amazing things you wear upon your feet 
 Can alter the gentleness my vision knows. 
 Seeing you hurry past me down the street. 
 
 89 
 
90 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 m 
 
 I know you. You are one of those who fear 
 The certain end of their uncertainties. 
 Who, never having had possession here, 
 Still seek it in such transient things as these 
 Bright windows looking into gaudy places 
 Where there are wine-lists and long bills of fare 
 Arranged for girls who wear their shoulders bare 
 And kindle eyes with passion from their faces. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the concert hall 
 
 You are the musician 
 
 I the listener. 
 
 Here your fingers touch no bow, 
 
 Make no music for me. 
 
 We pass one another 
 
 In a kind of silence 
 
 As if we were dead. 
 
 I do not marvel so that you can wear 
 A flower in your tailored buttonhole 
 As that the flower does not perish there 
 In the Winter of your soul. 
 
PASSERS-BY 91 
 
 VI 
 
 When you have passed and other eyes 
 Have found me with a new surprise, 
 I know I shall not call to mind 
 The colored hat you wore, the kind 
 Of dress nor anything so sure. 
 Only your laughter will endure 
 And come to me on other trips 
 Down other streets from other lips. 
 
LONGSHOREMAN 
 
 Longshoreman by a sea of sun, 
 
 Much wearied by too many bales, 
 
 A man moves. What of stone-chilled gales? 
 
 And what of old tasks never done? 
 
 Too low the rafters of the pier, 
 Too high the piles of casks and cases, 
 Too little light in fellow faces, 
 Too loud the noise of living here. 
 
 Are there warmer winds than these 
 That stir dark storms of stinging dust? 
 Are there waters of earth's crust 
 That reach sun-drenched Hesperides? 
 
 Longshoreman with a life for hire, 
 Bewildered by these days of his, 
 A man moves, and his moving is 
 A dark wind scattering smothered fire. 
 
 92 
 
SOLILOQUY 
 
 The winged seeds of early flowers go 
 
 Dancing on the wings of the ground wind, 
 
 Cutting their passage with unstable haste 
 
 In frantic spirals through this slow, sad brain. 
 
 I who have watched the passages of men 
 
 Watch these and time the watching to a twist 
 
 Of idle fingers among idle grasses 
 
 Making a motion as little understood. 
 
 The high and certain drift of afternoon 
 
 Toward an evening that comes creeping up the hills 
 
 Is busy altering the universe. 
 
 Busy with clouds whose lovely shapes must die. 
 
 I sit upon this stone almost securely 
 
 And, seeing the seeds blow down and fall to earth 
 
 In the relaxing hold of the faint air 
 
 And the crowned trees rise up and stand unstirred 
 
 And the mountains draw their shadows about their 
 
 shoulders 
 And the birds stop to sing on branches near me, 
 Feel conquered somehow by a sense of joy 
 That takes me at the heart and at the eyes. 
 Ah! Why so beautiful? Is man a jewel 
 
 93 
 
94 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 That he is set with sapphires of delight 
 
 And rubies of impassioned vividness 
 
 In the righ metal of earth's atmosphere? 
 
 A jewel? The wounds of forests on the hills 
 
 Cry out against him and the wildflowers break 
 
 Never to rise from deep man-trodden hollows, 
 
 And the birds, such of them as still have life. 
 
 Go crying weirdly, sadly, overhead. 
 
 Then why so beautiful, great Mansion Earth, 
 
 For man, mad-minded enemy of all? 
 
 Is it that to his devastating eyes 
 
 The bright pain of your beauty, summoning tears, 
 
 Summons a gifted vision not too dull 
 
 To see the heart of his eternal strangeness, 
 
 The animate power of that tidal sea 
 
 Which washes over him and is the world? 
 
SURRENDER 
 
 Is nothing changed? Nothing in all the town? 
 Is this the same street where my shadow swam? 
 Are these same clothes still saying what I am? 
 Is this the same sun settling thinly down? 
 
 Is the same door still subject to this key, 
 The carpet to these heels, the chairs still shoddy, 
 The bed still printed by my weary body. 
 The ceiling still the same height over me? 
 
 All, all the same. Hence my bewilderment. 
 Listen. When I went out just after nine 
 The world was dark, and all the dark was mine. 
 Beauty was dead, all beauty's savings spent. 
 
 Then all the world seemed muffled with deep ashes 
 
 And every step seemed walking up a flow 
 
 Of lava poured across all ways to go 
 
 And heaven seemed a mountain crowned with flashes. 
 
 That is exactly as things seemed just after 
 
 The door closed on my going. By what magic. 
 
 If things were so, is life no longer tragic? 
 
 Why are my .veins blown through by winds of laughter? 
 
 95 
 
96 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Has a man no way to defend himself 
 
 When the peace which comes with dignified despair 
 
 Seems ruffled and attacked from everywhere 
 
 Like a high hat snow-balled by some Christmas elf? 
 
 Not I. Let sun drive dusk from doors and hallways. 
 Let the brain leap. Swear dancing is its calling. 
 I yield. But leave me a little time for falling 
 Down on my knees to pray that it be for always. 
 
SHIRKING 
 
 I should have gone to the grocer's shop, 
 Down the alley and turn to the right, 
 To buy a lady some corn to pop 
 Over the coals to-night. 
 
 But I have been to Symphony Hall, 
 Up the alley and then in the cars. 
 And I am not what I was at all — 
 I know of nothing below the stars. 
 
 Marvelous moons are where lights should be, 
 Down the alley and home again, 
 Moons which sing as they gleam at me 
 From between the feet of the rain. 
 
 Suppose I had gone to the grocery store. 
 Dug in my pockets for coins to spend, 
 What would have come to the glamor I wore 
 In the end? 
 
 97 
 
BRETONNE 
 
 Break in upon the boisterous play of children 
 
 Sculling their clumsy boats by the breakwater 
 
 And ask them why she stands there looking outward. 
 
 All they will say is that she is someone's daughter. 
 
 The sunlight falls upon a tide so still 
 
 That corded masts against a cloudless heaven 
 
 Seem not to move nor creak nor rattle even 
 
 And there is no whispering from the pines on the hill. 
 
 Yet at the last stone of the crumbling wall 
 
 She stands as if the last of storms were blowing 
 
 And life were out in it and there were no knowing 
 
 Whether any colored sails would blow back at all. 
 
 Ask of the chattering women on their knees 
 
 Beside the dirty wash-pool why she is waiting 
 
 And they will laugh a laugh which speaks of hating 
 
 And point to their heads to show you what she sees. 
 
 Visions, perhaps, that fill all things with fire 
 
 And little ventures with enormous fears 
 
 And make a young girl old before her years 
 
 With the fierce burden of being what visions require. 
 
 Visions, perhaps, yet when the tide returns 
 
 Lifting the kelp on the rocks as wind lifts hair, 
 
 98 
 
BRETONNE 99 
 
 Someone who sailed will come and seek her there 
 
 And find the thing she is but not what burns 
 
 Within her as she meets the villagers 
 
 With the puzzled blankness of her strange wild face, 
 
 Half certain there can be no proper place 
 
 In the world of bodies for a trouble like hers. 
 
CIRCE 
 
 What slender Circe frightened by his steel 
 
 Gave up her magic and with crafty care 
 
 Forwarned him of this music on the air 
 
 And made him fear what these can make him feel? 
 
 Who was she, the mysterious Sorceress, 
 
 So jealous of shore sirens and their song 
 
 That she could urge him to make surely strong 
 
 With hempen twists his human willingness? 
 
 Too late he curses her, too late he sees 
 
 The terrible sweet joy those sirens tend 
 
 With blossomed breasts, moist mouths, a balmy bend 
 
 Of sea-foam throats, a flash of vivid knees. 
 
 Their white arms madden him, their voices drift 
 
 Across the winds with laughter from their eyes. 
 
 Lashed to his mast, he bums in heart and thighs. 
 
 Ropes bite his flesh, choke veins grown wildly swift. 
 
 Strange Circe said, "Beware those asking fire." 
 
 Ulysses, lingering with her, drank her words 
 
 And changed, not to a beast to swell her herds, 
 
 But to a man afraid of man's desire. 
 
 100 
 
CALYPSO 
 
 Serenely and like gentle touch of hands 
 The sunny wind stirs in a sad man's hair. 
 Lulled by the slip of ripples on far sands 
 He lies at peace. None of the world is there. 
 White Helen is a wisp of vanished cloud 
 Over deep memory ; Troy's walls, the many dead 
 Are gone, half hidden in a grievous shroud 
 Woven of sea-sounds and winds overhead. 
 Remembered Ithaca, half fair, half feared, 
 Beyond a faint horizon rising, falling. 
 Floats calmly, waiting, and dim things endeared 
 By aged distance breathe no word of calling. 
 
 n 
 
 Into the sleeper's dream the living sea 
 
 Shaped like a joyful woman whitely warm 
 
 Moves with rich silence and rare mystery 
 
 With lips to take his broken heart by storm. 
 
 With hands that reach up round him to draw down 
 
 Into their passionate oblivion 
 
 101 
 
102 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 The hurt soul, beaten by winds wrongly blown, 
 From which all help of heaven has passed on. 
 Her breath is on his lids, her body swims 
 Into his aching weariness. Ulysses 
 Flings up an arm to eyes the sea-mist dims. 
 Above the wind the white surf booms and hisses. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The sleeper wakens and the vision fades 
 
 And the world, done with its eclipse, grows clear. 
 
 The dream shape seems a sea of suns and shades 
 
 And Ithaca, an island hidden in fear. 
 
 Comes through a silver pain into his soul 
 
 And that immutable Penelope 
 
 For whom a man must keep his spirit whole, 
 
 Shines with inexorable tranquillity 
 
 Down on despair that hangs a humble head 
 
 Between her and a shamed swift wish to be 
 
 Safe for all time in the oblivious bed 
 
 Of Calypso, amorous woman of the sea. 
 
THE WINDMILL 
 
 By the sea the winds must blow 
 For the sea can never know 
 When a landsman miller dies. 
 So the winds blow down the skies, 
 Blow the silver mist from eyes 
 And the sails of windmills go. 
 Giant sails at sea are whirled 
 Round the windmill of the world. 
 
 103 
 
WIDOW'S WEEDS 
 
 Black clings about your beautiful unsleeved 
 Young body as windy rain about the stalk 
 Of a lithe poplar, slender and small-leaved. 
 Light as the talk of poplar stems your talk. 
 Beautiful! Of what are you bereaved 
 That grief weds with your shadow as you walk? 
 
 Why such a splendid lustre in your eyes 
 
 As not to any stranger seems like tears 
 
 For any part of man that ever dies? 
 
 Your ornaments of sorrow yield to the years 
 
 Which keep you fresh. Your body's poise belies 
 
 The sombre want of color which it wears. 
 
 From foot to face, like wind that sets astir 
 Breasts of bound water, the breath of living runs — 
 So moves the flame beneath the tigress' fur, 
 Howling against the night's diminished suns 
 From lonely thickets for one gone from her, 
 One whose hot loins are a cold skeleton's. 
 
 104 
 
NEW SINGING 
 
 FOR G. A. 
 
 When the far sun falls to my window-sill 
 And sparrows in the gutters chirp and chatter 
 And the earthy winds of morning come to scatter 
 The night's commandments to be sad and still, 
 Sweet sense of you comes to me like a fire 
 Searing and burning vein and vision clear 
 And you are not a goddess, and I hear 
 Wild voices singing, singing of desire. 
 
 n 
 
 Then trooping happiness with many flames 
 Comes dancing from the fringes of the sky 
 Attending what my body knows you by. 
 I rise and fling out arms and call your names. 
 The winds of morning whistle at the sill 
 And the world's beating rises from the stones, 
 But troops with torches kindle in my bones 
 Wild fires of you. All other things seem still. 
 
 105 
 
106 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 in 
 
 Beloved, how shall I be glad of you 
 Who have brought music to my silences 
 And beauty to my grass, leaves to my trees, 
 And with your vivid fingers now undo 
 The beaten darkness of those bat-like wings 
 Which for so long in my cathedral mind 
 Stifled what holy passions I could find 
 For keener light than sun or planet brings. 
 
 IV 
 
 With what rich gifts of what adoring state 
 Can I heap up the altar I have built? 
 Jewels will lose their lustre, flowers wilt, 
 Songs blow away and promises lose weight. 
 Should I bring pagan bullocks, garlanded, 
 To bellow in the porch for sacrifice? 
 Should I bring incense, burning, metals of price 
 And a shimmer of colored fabrics to outspread? 
 
 V 
 
 You are remembrance of some happy face, 
 Dear memory of once honored mystery 
 Flashed back to bitter earth to bloom and be 
 A joy, a living miracle taking place; 
 And I, a man whom beauty blinds with aching 
 And the pathos of desire makes desperate, 
 Find in that joy a new twice-blessed state, 
 A new life, a young heaven in the making. 
 
PRESENCE 
 
 Even though the city of streets and darkened hallways 
 
 Sweeps now about me where your wonders were, 
 
 And you are no longer here to minister 
 
 To hands of mine, and lips, that want you always; 
 
 Though there are strangers where we were together 
 
 And they are strange because I have lost your eyes. 
 
 Though little puddles scattered by feet disguise 
 
 Old ways we walked once in a better weather; 
 
 Yet this wet wind is breath that quickened you 
 
 Before you vanished and left me here alone: 
 
 These faces that pass me are memories which renew 
 
 What you once were in the dark city of stone; 
 
 What you once were! And that is what God is, even, 
 
 To hearts like ours that take the World for Heaven. 
 
 107 
 
DANCE 
 
 Against the valley which is full of moon 
 I see you move, feet on the clustered clover 
 Like rain-drops upon water. The sweet croon 
 Of serving instruments is faint, the clouds go over 
 In image of your hair. Your hands are torches 
 Carried for something that has many altars, 
 Your lifted eyes are temples in whose porches 
 The light of humbled planets kneels and falters. 
 A watching fire which burns like dawn in me 
 Leaps out and after you as breath to prayer, 
 Trembles beside you, touches your mystery 
 And flames triumphant in the dusky air. 
 Over the earth like light on bodiless breeze 
 I see you blow, I see your swift feet flash; 
 My senses shudder and fail and freed of these 
 And of the body which joy bums to ash 
 I enter you, sway fall and rise above 
 The limits of this creature that forgets. 
 Failing the touch of you, the look of love 
 And spends love's peace to improvise regrets. 
 Leap up, you Wonder, to the music of joy, 
 
 Move to the measures of the passionate moon, 
 
 108 
 
DANCE 109 
 
 Dance the proud chorus no man can destroy 
 
 For joy is life and limbs will stiffen soon 
 
 And I who am too brief to understand 
 
 Will soon be blind and wear a heavy hand. 
 
 And moon and clover and the magic wind 
 
 Will fade and all life's golden blood be thinned 
 
 Against the valley which is full of shadow 
 
 I see you move. You who are living light 
 
 And lovelier life than ever bloomed in the meadow 
 
 Leap up with laughter! Shatter the great night I 
 
REACH OUT 
 
 Reach out your hands and gather the light which falls 
 
 Into the room where you are sure to be; 
 
 Touch with your fingers those unshadowed walls 
 
 And let their presence fill you happily. 
 
 Not that these things are melodies and joys 
 
 But that, being near you, they have stored away 
 
 Some little of the beauty life employs 
 
 To bear you through disproof of things I say. 
 
 Lift up your arms to the wind that blows the curtain 
 
 And know that I, with forehead to the floor, 
 
 Am at your feet, so beautiful and certain, 
 
 With reverence and a happy fear and more 
 
 In want of just such flashing of sweet fire 
 
 As your hands on my shoulders might inspire. 
 
 110 
 
YOU AND I 
 
 Were you a tree I know how you would rise 
 From earth made green with lying at your feet 
 Against fresh wind and sun made strong and sweet 
 By touch and gleam of leaves which you made wise. 
 
 Were you a bird you would be just the one 
 To startle silence in some strange wild way 
 By flight more rosily swift than rising day 
 And colors never prismed in any sun. 
 
 Were you a river you would not be calm 
 But rather with rich laughter flash and stream 
 Through valleys where no man should come to dream 
 So much as drink you thirstily from his palm. 
 
 Though you are all of these, yet to the tree 
 I have been only wind; to the winged thing 
 A watcher only, and to the wandering 
 Of strong bright water a dreamer who could see 
 Only an image of his reasoned pride 
 Wrapped close about the fire it hoped to hide. 
 
 Ill 
 
EPITHALAMIUM 
 
 Across the sky a flight of burning dust. 
 
 The air grips at me as I stand 
 
 Held to the wild earth's whirling crust 
 
 By power that works through foot and lifted hand. 
 
 Swiftly the shoulders of the hills lift against the stars, 
 
 Swiftly they rise and cross the moon's face. 
 
 I hold tightly to the pasture bars 
 
 And plant my feet upon this grassy place 
 
 And close my eyes to close the sense that mars 
 
 My motion through the circle of the sky, 
 
 Through wind and fire which I am governed by. 
 
 Over my head the night stands like a sea 
 
 And the stars rock and dip among the waves. 
 
 Like water the flood of life sweeps over me 
 
 From wing that stirs and grass that paves. 
 
 Even the peaks that pierce heaven with their flying 
 
 Shudder with strength and splendor in their places. 
 
 Nothing is dead. Nothing is even dying. 
 
 Life leaps like fire from all things, all faces. 
 
 So in the night I stand, my body bearing 
 
 Fiercely and blindly in its inmost vein 
 
 The secret power of the last star's staring, 
 
 112 
 
EPITHALAMIUM 113 
 
 The passion of the moon for fields of grain, 
 
 The anguish of all hunger and all pain; 
 
 The blessed burden which gives life to life, 
 
 The beauty which a man takes shape to hold, 
 
 The breath which blows through bodies like a knife, 
 
 The seed a man is moisture to unfold. 
 
 And all these things, as all the studded skies 
 
 Spread moon and star, I pour from out my heart 
 
 Because of hands that have torn wide apart 
 
 Great stony dykes once raised against surprise 
 
 Which kept my soul from navigable waves. 
 
 Racing cold corridors as dark as graves. 
 
 Oh, radiant Wonder! Oh, touched Being! I turn 
 
 Not from this window opening out of me 
 
 In fear, but with unlidded eyes that burn 
 
 In image of imagined destiny. 
 
 I reach in darkness for your holy hands 
 
 To touch and so feel something taking form 
 
 Here where this mortal measure of me stands, 
 
 A joy to blow me wise with splendid storm. 
 
 If there is any aim or end to this 
 
 Great outward surging of stirred blood and bone 
 
 In such a nearness of your spirit there is 
 
 More perfect sense than men have ever known 
 
 Of where it lies and how a man may go 
 
 Forever in its way. This then you are. 
 
 How shall I say — be glad — ^to you who know 
 
 More fierce strong things of beauty than any star 
 
 Knows of the .upper air? How shall I speak 
 
114 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 When speech is only a kissing of the hems 
 
 Of that toward which the dawns of your eyes break, 
 
 Toward which you rise as flowers rise on stems? 
 
 Oh, Beautiful! I am no longer young. 
 
 Now from the gentle breast of your wise being 
 
 I lift my head and open eyes for seeing. 
 
 I clamber down from that to which I clung. 
 
 I take on stature and with stature grow 
 
 Humble that I have fed upon you so. 
 
 Across the sky a flight of burning dust. 
 
 The air grips at me as I stand 
 
 Held to the wild earth's whirling crust 
 
 By power that works through foot and lifted hand. 
 
 Oh, lift your face and give my lips your mouth! 
 
 The wind of Summer sings from the starred South. 
 
 Forgive me what I was when winds were West. 
 
 Straining the blossomed throbbing of your breast 
 
 Against my leaping heart I feel the give 
 
 Of wild earth riding onward, fiercely whirled, 
 
 I see the vivid sun, I see the world 
 
 Beyond men's brains where love may learn to live. 
 
STORM 
 
 Over the mountain now 
 The cold clouds ride like a sea. 
 Come with your lips and your brow 
 And your breast and be close to me. 
 
 It is black where the mountain stands 
 And the valley streams are foam. 
 Come to me now with your hands 
 And let my heart go home. 
 
 There is only one way to meet storm — 
 With a flame of towering fire 
 Rising from hearts that are warm 
 With wise desire. 
 
 Take my lips to your brow 
 And let me look in your eyes, 
 For over the mountain now 
 Wild storm winds fling the skies. 
 
 115 
 
NOCTURNE 
 
 When you have let the late sun burn you bare 
 
 And have given yourself to the wind 
 
 Come look for me and I shall rise and tear 
 
 The darkness from old spruce-woods still unthinned 
 
 And you shall have it to bind round your hair. 
 
 When you have lain at night among dark trees 
 Filling the heaven of your eyes with stars 
 And your white body with the singing breeze, 
 Come where I am and I shall bend the bars 
 Of moonlight to whatever shape you please. 
 
 When you have bathed bright breast and shining shoulder 
 Deep in the darkness of some mountain pool, 
 Body to body take me and let smolder 
 The deep fires. Far away old suns grow cool. 
 Look! Here are embers that will not grow colder! 
 
 116 
 
WORDS 
 
 Not all the help men ever have of dreams 
 
 Could make of life what life beside you is. 
 
 Not all the singing of all vocal streams 
 
 Could make of sound what with some strong-mouthed kiss 
 
 I stop upon the laughter of your lips. 
 
 Not all the motion and fire of stars and suns 
 
 Could move the skies as in my finger-tips, 
 
 Touching your breast, the life is moved and runs. 
 
 Not all the angels of eventual heaven 
 
 Could do with darkness what your eyes can do. 
 
 So I choose not to die at twenty-seven, — 
 
 Perhaps at thirty or at thirty-two. 
 
 117 
 
THE DURHAMS 
 
 There is Niagara, which is water tumbling 
 
 From cliffs which keep it thundering and rumbling, 
 
 But that is nothing to the fall of storm 
 
 From heights of cold to meadows moist and warm 
 
 In Autiman over Windbrook. In November 
 
 When a turkey's life is down to its last ember 
 
 A little wind with only leaves to drift 
 
 Creeps from the West to Southward through a shift 
 
 Made to seem very like a lull, and then 
 
 Blows up the valley toward the peak again. 
 
 Then tides of mist come sweeping from the sea 
 
 And climb the ridge and linger dizzily 
 
 And plunge like sublimated water down 
 
 Gray gulleys which converge upon the town. 
 
 Where is Niagara in the face of this? 
 
 Diminished and outdone, and all the hiss 
 
 Of all its seethe of spray is but a quiet 
 
 Beside this fall of storm-cloud and this riot 
 
 Of frantic pines and birches bent like bows 
 
 Drawn to ward off the onslaught of their foes. 
 
 118 
 
THE DUKHAMS 119 
 
 Just such an Autumn storm was in full course 
 
 When Abel Durham with his old lame horse 
 
 Drove up into his dooryard and descended, 
 
 And young Job, through the window, saw what ended 
 
 The long, hard time of two men badly keeping 
 
 A house whose only woman was one sleeping 
 
 Under the sandy pines beyond the road, 
 
 A woman freed of her enslaving load. 
 
 Here was another woman to keep going 
 
 The heavy house of man, and winds were blowing 
 
 Wildly and fiercely so she might not say 
 
 Ever at any time of night or day 
 
 That her coming was unwarned, though Durham smiled 
 
 In partial refutation of the wild 
 
 And unequivocal welcome of the storm. 
 
 The old man brought her in to get her warm 
 
 And grinned at Job, who thought them man and wife 
 
 And called up the best features of a life 
 
 Devoid of women. Durham spoke her names. 
 
 Not any of which were Durham. Two small flames 
 
 Lent by the lantern to her eyes, saw Job. 
 
 He shook her hand and took the carriage robe, 
 
 Frightened by what he saw that spoke to him 
 
 There in her face, so very far from dim. 
 
 He was puzzled by the strangeness of those eyes 
 
 Flung backwards over a round shoulder lifted. 
 
 He stayed about the kitchen, killing flies. 
 
 Watching for stove-lids waiting to be shifted. 
 
 And when he .went to bed he saw himself 
 
120 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Set in some crazy figure like an elf 
 Following a woman through place after place, 
 A woman with strange meaning in her face. 
 And then he woke and heard a woman move 
 Down in the kitchen lighting up the stove, 
 And it was morning and the sun was bright 
 And life had altered, worm-like, in the night. 
 
 II 
 
 A mild man with a gentle silver beard 
 
 And eyes of a blue no baby ever feared 
 
 And large black clothes and little quiet feet 
 
 Walked in his room and rubbed his hands for heat 
 
 And, feeling his conscience go a little lame, 
 
 Wondered what he would say when Durham came. 
 
 He stopped beside his table and lit the lamp 
 
 Then turned his head to listen to a tramp 
 
 Of muddy shoes upon the snow outside. 
 
 The sound spread like a ripple and grew wide. 
 
 The mild man shook with insecure relief 
 
 Borrowed from respite, and turned over a leaf 
 
 In a large lamp-lit book upon the table 
 
 And stooped to fortify the charitable 
 
 Intention of his mission with the word 
 
 Of one much read but very seldom heard. 
 
 His straight sweet lips moved faintly. His eyes closed. 
 
 His hands closed. His head swayed as if he dozed 
 
 While the lamplight fell upon his fine, smooth hair 
 
THE DURHAMS 121 
 
 And on his face, and made it seem nowhere 
 
 In any plane at all, too frankly near 
 
 For any heaven and too faint for here. 
 
 His lips moved silently and then he rose 
 
 And crept to the curtained window on tip-toes 
 
 As if the God he prayed to might discern 
 
 His human, uncontrollable concern. 
 
 He stood a moment peering into the dark 
 
 Following every far-off little spark, 
 
 Which might be wagon-lights, until it grew 
 
 And clattered loudly past as wagons do. 
 
 Once when one heavy bulk without a lamp 
 
 Came almost quietly and stood breathing damp 
 
 Before his gate, the pastor's heart beat higher 
 
 And chokingly and filled his face with fire. 
 
 His hands with dampness and his feet with cold 
 
 And his mind with unhappy sense of being old. 
 
 He saw old Durham sitting starkly still 
 
 As if awaiting some decree of will 
 
 To move him, saw him drop the reins and rise 
 
 And wrap his blanket tighter about his thighs 
 
 And then sit back again and speak to his team 
 
 And move ahead as if he wouldn't dream 
 
 Of stopping there, much less of going in 
 
 To be addressed in terms of God and sin. 
 
 The pastor wandered back into his chair 
 
 And threw his head back and sat panting there. 
 
 And then he rose again and paced the floor. 
 
 And at the window and the loose-hung door 
 
122 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 The wind went shuddering, as if to say- 
 That nothing is to-morrow nor to-day- 
 Just as it seems to men who think their brains 
 Have seen and follow laws which God ordains 
 Without consulting life, the citizen 
 Of winds and places, animals and men. 
 The grave man lighted still another lamp 
 And then resumed his lightfoot, troubled, tramp 
 And thought that he would try the woman next 
 And so be more inspired and less perplexed 
 And lose all feeling that the Winter wind 
 Is nearer than the Lord to a man's mind. 
 
 in 
 
 A woman at a window watched a man 
 
 Load up his sleigh with bags and an oil can 
 
 And climb aboard and gee the horses off 
 
 And fog the air a little with his cough. 
 
 She watched him to the highway, where the team 
 
 Broke to a jingling trot. She watched the stream 
 
 Hurrying under the bridge, so swift and certain. 
 
 And then she shuddered and drew the window curtain 
 
 And stood a moment pressing at her cheeks 
 
 With anguished fingers which left livid streaks. 
 
 She saw the mirror and was reflected there, 
 
 And watched as she pulled hair-pins from her hair 
 
 Letting it fall a little about one shoulder, 
 
 All black, no gray to prove her growing older — 
 
THE DURHAMS 123 
 
 All black and soft, far softer than the face 
 
 To which it helped a little to give grace. 
 
 The curtain at the window flapped in the draft 
 
 And the late Winter sun wedged in a shaft 
 
 Of thin-blown gold that reached as far as the wall 
 
 And kindled the printed roses, thorns and all. 
 
 The woman stood and listened to a stir 
 
 Of heavy moving in the room next to her. 
 
 The floor-boards creaked a little and the wall 
 
 Shivered and made small grains of plaster fall. 
 
 The woman listened and stepped nearer the door 
 
 Loosening a button in the waist she wore. 
 
 She spoke in a voice which had faint shudders in it 
 
 Asking for Job to come to her a minute. 
 
 And then she sat and stared across the bed 
 
 And pressed a hand palm-outward to her head. 
 
 She said "Come in" when there was a light knocking 
 
 Then moved her noisy chair back and sat rocking. 
 
 Job entered timidly, with averted eyes. 
 
 His hands were large and thick, his feet of a size. 
 
 His voice was knife-edged but it soon was warm 
 
 With other lips among the black, soft storm 
 
 Of loosened hair. The old walls kept their creaking 
 
 And there was other language than lip-speaking, 
 
 Youth crying out to youth and fear to fear 
 
 That rich, red veins beat far too high to hear — 
 
 The strange wild anguish of unblossomed lives 
 
 Seeking a safety in what the moment gives 
 
 When beauty. traces beauty among limbs 
 
124 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 No voice of reason waras nor even dims. 
 
 The world was on the other side of walls — 
 
 The world of sleigh-bells and of crisp foot- falls, 
 
 But strange volcanoes of half-planned mischance 
 
 Sometimes burst wide and do a fiery dance 
 
 In the impassioned spheres beyond earth's law. 
 
 Neither the woman nor her lover saw 
 
 Durham creep up and listen at the door, 
 
 And neither heard the creaking of the floor. 
 
 For they lay still and listened to their hearts, 
 
 For they were children, and no child's ear starts 
 
 At such small things as sounds. So Durham waited 
 
 And the thumping in his breast was unabated. 
 
 And then he heard them stir and felt like falling 
 
 And a great darkness rose and stood there walling 
 
 Life and the living from his furtive brain 
 
 And all of him seemed breaking under the strain. 
 
 Back down the stairs he groped his way and through 
 
 The dizzy kitchen, slamming the door to. 
 
 And then those happy bodies above stairs 
 
 Leaped to their feet aware of life that wears 
 
 A cowering defeated look and goes 
 
 Stooped and distorted as the least wind blows. 
 
 IV 
 
 Far up the slope of birch and brooding fir 
 Where winds in green strings make aeolian stir 
 Of rippled singing, little feet and wings 
 
THE DURHAMS 125 
 
 Carry the lives they tend and thunderings 
 
 Of water falling from far rocky walls 
 
 Fade among mosses and the sunlight falls 
 
 In softer silence. The shrill cry of jays 
 
 Shrieks in the clearings and the mole obeys 
 
 His wish to hide, and world-old gravities 
 
 Are disobeyed by this year's chicadees. 
 
 There to the windward of a coppice lies 
 
 With lowered head and deep, inquiring eyes 
 
 A slim white thing made as if out of breeze 
 
 That carries snow, of little sapling trees 
 
 Rich with some April, delicate and rare, 
 
 Too beautiful to sleep, for unaware 
 
 Of things less beautiful that stalk their prey 
 
 Beauty is never safe. By night nor day 
 
 There is no rest for loveliness, no repose. 
 
 Always a deer, with wakeful ears and nose. 
 
 Must listen and breathe, more surely when a doe 
 
 From throat to haunches is as white as snow. 
 
 There by a coppice of dark evergreen 
 
 The Windbrook doe lies down, unheard, unseen. 
 
 Like a grouse booming goes her restless heart 
 
 And her strained flanks keep twitching, ready to start 
 
 Up and away at scent or sound of fear. 
 
 At sun that alters shadows, winds that veer 
 
 And carry safety with them. Always so. 
 
 There is no peace but says, "Rise up and go!" 
 
 The forest in its dusk is full of snares. 
 
 Even the best tuned sense comes unawares 
 
126 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Sometimes upon inevitable end — 
 A hunter's bullet or a lynx to mend 
 The broken life and bind it up with death 
 And suck the crimson fire and stop the breath 
 That quickened beauty and inspired the wood 
 With sudden ecstasy. Such is the food 
 Which gives the busy fittest their survival — 
 Beauty, of which there may be no revival 
 Once the wild seed is cleft and the kernel gone. 
 The white doe shudders and leaps and hurries on. 
 
 The wind among roof icicles was weird 
 Although the sap was in the maple roots. 
 Old Durham, with some ice in heart and beard, 
 Stood in the doorway brushing off his boots. 
 He shut the door and slapped it with his cap 
 And lurched across the kitchen to the tap 
 Where water trickled over pans and dishes 
 And shells of eggs and remnants of tinned fishes. 
 The stove was cold. There was not even sun 
 To slip in through the panes and kindle it. 
 With such a fire as shines for everyone 
 But him who learns that life is a misfit. 
 Old Durham burned his fingers on a match 
 And tore his coat-sleeve on the woodshed latch 
 And stumbled in the kindling. These were spears 
 Of that world-militant which a man fears 
 
THE DURHAMS 127 
 
 Who fears himself and finds that mad self lodged 
 
 In all things neighboring and familiar 
 
 In all the shifts by which he ever dodged 
 
 The fall of facts, the rise of things that are. 
 
 The stove was not unyielding. It grew warm 
 
 And Durham rubbed his hands and held them near it 
 
 And looked through frost-etched windows at the storm 
 
 And heard the wind and wished he couldn't hear it. 
 
 He found some rags and stuffed them at the sills 
 
 But there are crevices which nothing fills 
 
 In men and houses and the storm still shrieked 
 
 In lath and brain and both those frail things creaked. 
 
 The gaunt man sat awhile and sucked and blew 
 
 Breath which had all that any air could do 
 
 To feed him what his old thin blood required. 
 
 His beard kept thawing and his boots perspired, 
 
 And there were demons prodding at his ease 
 
 With sharp innumerable miseries. 
 
 He searched in corners for more window-cloths 
 
 And found some in a closet full of moths 
 
 And under them a woman's pair of shoes 
 
 Down at the heel and broken at the toes. 
 
 He dropped the rags and let the shoes fall, too, 
 
 And stood and stared at them as if they told 
 
 Some old forgotten thing and were a clue 
 
 To dishes and cold stove and the storm's cold. 
 
 He looked at them and then he raised his boot 
 
 And kicked them as he might have kicked a root 
 
 That tripped him on his going to the spring. 
 
128 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 He kicked them both and saw them fly and bring 
 
 Hard up against the glaze of window-frost. 
 
 They crashed and went, but tongues of blizzard crossed 
 
 The silver threshold of the shattered panes 
 
 And stung the stove with little stings of steam 
 
 And Durham stared, as children stare at trains, 
 
 And gaped as if it might have been a dream. 
 
 He swore at what he thought was hounding him 
 
 And stuffed the holes with rags. The room grew dim. 
 
 He shifted pots in fury and kept looking 
 
 To see if things were done that sat there cooking. 
 
 He drank his coffee warm, like milk from a cow. 
 
 And ate cold beans and felt the cold wind blow. 
 
 VI 
 
 The old man stamped about his sugar-camp 
 
 Counting the buckets and the spigot pegs, 
 
 Wondering how ever any man could tramp 
 
 To all those trees with but one pair of legs. 
 
 And now and then he stopped and his breath came 
 
 Thick, like a horse's, and he had to lean 
 
 Against the brick-work of the kettle frame 
 
 To come up out of the fog in which he had been. 
 
 He had his gun beside him, thinking of bear, 
 
 And once he stumbled on it and it fell 
 
 And made him dizzy to see it lying there. 
 
 If it went off his ears had failed to tell. 
 
 For they were thumping, thumping, with a heart 
 
THE DURHAMS 129 
 
 So startled that there seemed no more to start. 
 He stooped and raised the gun, and straightening, 
 Saw through the door a stir of something moving 
 Far up among the maple boles. No wing. 
 Perhaps a bear, but waiting would be proving. 
 He stood and watched and seemed to see a blur 
 Of round converging wheels that came and went. 
 He wiped his eyes and still there was a stir 
 Beyond the trees. A branch swung down and bent. 
 A windfall crashed. A bird far out of reach 
 Sang in the barren branches of a beech. 
 The old man watched and neither saw nor heard 
 Things which were yet half visible in his brain — 
 A woman, all in white, a little blurred — 
 A man whose presence irkcl him and gave pain; 
 And out beyond these things a naked grove 
 Of old untimely trees and drifts of snow 
 And a faint sense of something waiting to move 
 And a void lull of winds about to blow. 
 He took a breath again and rubbed his eyes. 
 There. He saw it now. No bear moves so, 
 For it was tinged with white, and white implies 
 Some lighter thing, perhaps the rare white doe. 
 The old man trembled and swung up his gun. 
 It shook, but the sights shone clearly in the sun 
 And then he seemed to lose the sighted thing. 
 There was a swift spasmodic stiffening 
 Of finger on the trigger and a roar 
 And whatever it had been was there no more. 
 
130 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 
 
 Old Durham staggered out into the snow 
 Helped by the proud unbending trunks of trees 
 Up toward the place where there should be a doe 
 White as the snowflakes of a Winter breeze. 
 And then the images came back again — 
 The irksome man came striding into his brain 
 And the white woman lay upon the ground. 
 Then something flashed. He fell without a sound.