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Water Front 7 Together 9 The Concrete Age 10 Woman Alighting 11 Man Alighting 11 Why Not? 12 Textile Ways 14 Willow and Mahogany 14 She Started Me Asking 15 Vacuum 16 Speeding Under The Live Wire 17 Invisible Passengers 18 I'm Off To Tea 20 Starting For The Car 21 Disillusioned 22 Parallel 23 The Swamp Witch 25 Internative 27 A Squandered Day 28 The Street Car Orphan 30 Parting 31 Baby Holding A Basket of Lilacs 32 When I Turn My Back 34 Similitude 35 Genesis . 37 Still Waiting 38 Composite 40 Wind Back Of The Yards 42 Wildbird On The Wire 44 Round And Round 45 Tantalus 47 The Bull's Eye 48 The Optimist's Ego 49 The Runaway 51 Pain In Transit 53 Reviewing In Transit 54 Bach's Melody for the G String 55 That Someone 57 Constancy .59 Just As Lief 60 Silences 61 Motory 62 Fresh Fields 63 My Country 'Tis of Thee 64 Sculpt 65 Rivals 66 Halstead Silhouette 67 Imagine And Travel 68 New To Him 69 Star Dawn 71 Verily, Verily 72 TROLLEY LINES TROLLEY LINES WATER FRONT You, who often lie so still, Sifting the dense fumes of the city Into sea-lights and satin edgings — You, who flick through the spaces, When from intermittent streets You call us With your patches of beauty — You balmy, crouching blue wonder— You, who shadow our skyline, And make it dance like a hoyden; Snapping its pattern, Dissolving it back into etchings, Ragging them with your shore-wash- You, who laugh in your lakebed And spread out your body, Stretching to show us Your bowelling vastness — You, the designer Who stencils our borders With reaches of freedom, And dances our shipping on festoons and arches; You, the singer, to pour out and quicken Your waters — In the roar of your beauty Drink to our City, Anoint it with willing! TOGETHER Let me rather ride, For when I walk I meet but fragments And nomad fancies — Fragments of bodies Like dismal wandering accidents Drifting into tangles. Let me rather ride That I may meet men and women together Drawn in a single direction To certain landing places; Let me join in the ride with them, Even though they drift Afterward. THE CONCRETE AGE When I stay at home I think of myself; I find myself planning For soft bedding neutrals To tie into eider quilts To nurse my restless hopes. When I ride I think of my brother. The vivid wire over- crest Dissolves the cobble stones; They become one With my dust. They become sifted and mixed with doings. My concrete rides over the concrete Of the pavement Over the powdered atoms of the species that were. When I ride I am charged with the current of service Which turns clods to men, Which turns men into races again — Races that create the miriad-god — The god of conrete Who created me. 10 WOMAN ALIGHTING A star, a flame; A wondering clothed in turns; A soft-fleshed foot touches the dust; It grounds the current; The power-coils of the inter-realms Start a flow Through breasts and hair And parkway grass-splashes. MAN ALIGHTING Wresting and springing Clear of the rail ; One leap to the pavement; Delighting in himself, the goal; Then off to the next mounting and overcoming; On to the fresh arriving — All lustily attired For the brunt game. 11 WHY NOT? A pair of Maybirds Would not choose the trolley eaves For nesting places; Yet I angle for lines To weave into thought-containers In the thudding corner Of the car, — Here, where all these overhead currents Lend me private wires Into the unreachable. Over there sits a pinkish pair With half the passengers before And half behind ; Deaf and sightless, Save to each other, they make me see That only Maybirds have rights, Only twinning plans have sense, Only charged beings occupy space, And songs are not so out of place As news mongering On a trolley. 12 TEXTILE WAYS Every day When I get off the bus I feel as though I'd left Life's shifting looms behind, To take up my single thread again. I untwist; I ravel myself Out of the scales of self-mercerization ; I widen out again Through restful mediums Into the scope of decorative line, And primary color And planes of design ; Then am I ready for the Great Weaver's Patterns of tomorrow. 13 WILLOW AND MAHOGANY Out of the seat beside me She fluttered, Covered with slinking silk And fur-trimmed gauze — thinner than she, She! The water-blooded jade of decency, Out of whose veins The essence of at least four pro-genitors Had been bleached into aenemia! She trailed her fashionable figure And a stream of perfume Followed her to the car door. Into the seat Heavy with work, Pressed down with bundles, Came my dusky sister; Odors of the jungle; Limbs, like timbers uncut; Arms, quieted by heavy work; Skin, hoary with the wait of ages That would break the bark and build. 14 SHE STARTED ME ASKING Were all her goings and comings — like curves? All her footfalls — like metred lines? Were all her dinings and sleepings — just make- readies for verses? Were her housings and clothing — just coverings for more and more poems to escape, from their folds and swathings? Were her giggles — formless, gurgling rhymes? Were her turnings and swayings — just part of the flow of a river lyric? Did her light questions — need sonnets to answer? At least she started me Asking all this, As she mounted the step, And the folded panel doors unfolded And snapped her in; Leaving me on the curb In the sky-gray evening. 15 VACUUM Yes, she was beautiful once; Yes, she had a lover, too; Yes, held close little faces; And more — worked, served, sacrificed. But where are the traces? I met her waiting at the corner As though she had always waited there. See, how Time's chisel chases And embosses vibrant links Set with jewels — jewels of experience — All in vain, For there are no traces. Masks with vacant smiles Round sight-worn eyes In sagging faces, What abhorrent voids you form In barren places! Perhaps some day, we'll blast the beaker Tear the stone away — We women who bear no traces. 16 [SPRING UNDER THE LIVE WIRE I looked and saw the blown dust lift That flew before us as we trolled along; Its glistening particles rainbowed As might a mist hung before a sunset. I guessed some secret stir was in the wind. The crackle of the current Slipped into a hum; The silt came up in waves Smelling with ground secrets, just unlocked, Like anions fresh dissolved. Had the wire felt the thrill of passing thrushes northbound — Wild inside with volts of song to flood their mates As soon as roosts might rest them, In trees that wooded their long- journeyed dreams? It seemed as though the whole Had grounded suddenly through me; For I tasted the charge between my teeth, And the world of things went dead And left my schemes Like empty dry batteries. 17 INVISIBLE PASSENGERS You could fancy That the goblet of death Had overflowed for her. Her eyes seemed looking Through a gate with questions; Far away songs swept her with listening. Her's were untaught eyes and ears Mysteries were just beginning to open to them As whenceward they shifted. Her aimless moves showed untrained fingers; Could they be feeling For some vanished pulse? Locked in the chamber of changelessness Did she hold some one unforgettable — Still, secret and silent and hidden? Was she climbing down through wonder-rounds To find deep away there in the hold Her heart's stowaway? 18 Or was she listening to footsteps Echoing through the locked canyons of her memory Ravining and bridging her purposes? I am sure an invisible passenger In its over-flight Was coaxing her to reach into distances. For she smiled in under-melodies And did not note the crowd about — The crowd which hummed bass off the key. 19 I'M OFF TO TEA We'll meet And 'mong the curving silver things We'll sit, and look into each other's faces, All framed in oval, cloudy fragrance. Our fingers will flutter Up and down with their porcelain bowls Of steaming Pekoe — With its familiar body odors Whiling us to empty raptures. Laughter, and little flames Of love-words we'll sip Into our ears; And many a far-off look will hang With fringing memories. Ah, if a lifetime might be tacked Into such a satisfying hour! 20 STARTING FOR THE CAR At home, and you on the wing! Against my inner walls A startled longing beats. You, out where I can not stretch my hand And cover you with the brooding robes of care ! You, firstborn from the quivering orifice Of my love-pollenated soul ! You, that I could kneel over And libate with my breast's litany! The thought of whom Oft turns my muscles into smiles That break through every move And give with mighty armfuls All that I am To ease your frail falls! At rest, and you striving there! Straining all the outer man To feed the outer — for so 'tis willed ! And here this fecund, fertile, cumulous being, The storehouse for the strong-limbed races That shall be — the Woman, sits at home Streaming with the power to yield — A parasite, a satellite, a poem. 21 DISILLUSIONED We bumped each other Going round the curve. It was as though I put my finger into soft flummery; Uncertain vague bubbles Seemed to enfold her Through the immediate. Then I realized that I had struck Something — somewhere, farther down. Had I touched the inner crust Which the crude fluxes of the ages Had hardened into a fixed being — All the atoms having fit at last? Would the pryers call it her sub-consciousness? The prayers describe it as her primitive pagan- inity? Her rival name it as ainnate commonness? We did not call it anything, But both laughed, And from that instant Everything was plain between us; We could never be deceived In each other again. 22 PARALLEL So many haloes have been thrown at me To slip over my head At this game of ring-toss ! There was the youth halo; The lover-romance halo; The inebrious halo of piety ; The circlet of young laurel-lives Woven into the parent halo ! But I've escaped them all. Yet IVe had the lume of it all; And here I am Just a little nobody anyhow, That dares take its lonesome fling At the Infinite. I jostle the human bunches — They do not realize How sought out I have been By haloes. They little dream When they meet them face to face, Such wonders of the world. 23 The conductor charges me Not a cent more than the rest. But when I step off the car The frost of the hand rail Singes my fingers. Ha! the Iron has recognized me! Alas, I am betrayed, for It knows That my living spark is full of It — That my currents flow with Its veins Parallel! 24 THE SWAMP WITCH Rolling, rolling avenues of humans ! Seeking the scent — The blood scent — half way cross the world They have come, To jump the claim of the swamp witch. They squat all over the prairie; They join their own odors with The moist odors of smoked flesh, And a sweetish, half -human, Half- commercial flavor Floods the pocked alleys Where the cow-paths All lead to one shamble. Here in huts Like bargaining prairie dogs They perch and watch and dodge all day. Once it was an onion patch — Shi-ka-go-o — Mixed with lulling water-lilies Half the year. Lolly-fat squaws squatted On the dry patches 25 Stewing fish in earthen pots. We can prove it, For we're still here who remember. Now the old wizard — From whom they ran half way cross the world- Waves his greedy wand And they fetch him their bagged plenty Their clots of honey Stolen from the witch's comb; They lend him wampum to buy with; Their prairie schooners steam up To carry it to him. — These rolling, rolling avenues of humans ! But the soul of the old swamp-witch Still hovers unseen through the smudge, She hisses mid the overhead lines She sulks through the sewers And her clammy claim is unsettled By its jumpers. 26 INTERNATIVE Each one of my trolley songs Lilts for me fresher Than the one tripped on the last jog. Yesterday I met a calico goddess That shed verses like a moulting fawn; Today I race home with exploding lips To tell in a gale of vision How a bunch of pussywillows Transplanted the dune waves To the city, For me to catch their spray there. Last week a Lithuanian girl Passed me near the Stockyards On the way to a festival of her folk ; And yet I feast from her vanished eyes On the light of a people Waiting to tell its long dream, And let its language be excuse enough For the brother-wise; A race, holding in its broken bowl The coin of all the tongues — The broil of all the races ! The rattling old trolley will yet Run me into international debt. 27 A SQUANDERED DAY I'm home again With a squandered day to reckon for. How can I squander a day When another unrolls before it's slipped The brimming morrow's lake of longings? How can I be a spendthrift Of life and joy, those two pearls Which, through spending, self-divide Into endless strings? Days are Forevers in a single drop. The dew rolls like a globuled sun To set in infinity; So days Roll into the eternal Yet stay the perfect now. O, day, that I have loved, You are mine forever — Can you be lost or squandered When you in passing fair Have poured your sap into my leafing aims? Are you not an expanding thing like me? Within our two breasts the same morning buds 28 To burst into another day. So what is lost, when in gluttony We taste, devour, dissipate And squander each other? When the evening drifts Into the creeping dusk for both of us, There in the dark together We kiss the forehead of the Beautiful Forever, And wake into a dream to know We've never slept, and that Tomorrow Never yet arrived Out of the far land of Time. When the curtain lifts again Is it not simply you and I Travelling home from our Yesterday? 29 THE STREET CAR ORPHAN I can't ride the trolley For me that is taboo. Life has chosen me, Given me privilege; It has supplied me With my own motor, My own track, My own gas. Has not pork crowned me And clothed me And housed me And husbanded me, In an English mansion On a windy new boulevard? Has not rich, red beef blood Given me my place — And should I not be loyal? And did not the architect In purist nicety cap my rafters And my gable frontage With decorative blood-ripe buzzards To watch daily and nightly To keep me loyal? 30 I can't ride the trolley For me that is taboo ! 1 must keep away from folks And stay sub-human That I may be happy. PARTING The bud leaving the frond to uncurl, The seed falling from the pod To jubilantly rush into germination, Can they outdistance the gulf of parting Which I feel when I go to meet The reefs of approval And leave behind your keen love-sifting lance Which opens the pod That I may rush jubilantly too, Into the fresh frosts Which will pierce my coverings And let me out? 31 BABY HOLDING A BASKET OF LILACS (Decoration Day) Hear the song That sings to me out of the basket : "I am Purple! I have reigned supreme for centuries. I have decked kings and flowers, Grapes and plums with myself; I have blinded the world with romance; I have painted altar windows; Blurred the sancity of love ; On drifts of heliotrope I've elbowed palace balustrades; Proud parrots of queens Noised me on their wings; Peacocks fanned me to the breeze; I claim the eyes of every babe I've decked with lapis jewelry; And breast milk flowed with my thin tints As I wrapped me round the mass imperially. "I am Purple! I have covered the spindle legs of potentates While with my deep dyed lash They kept the weak scattered; 32 I've tinged fine linen to drape martyr's limbs And bandage goddess' eyes, And none have dared to challenge me. "Crowned am I with lilacs, Laden with plums, Swollen with grapes; Bursting with myself — Purple!" But I looked again: The dissolving picture filmed itself; In the sheen of it I saw The Purple split! The red mob was born; The robes of irony dropped From the blue limbs of the martyr; The flowers in the basket laughed back into the baby's eyes; Birds seemed to nestle at his feet; I saw islands bloom with flax Growing fine linen to swaddle him. The mob quieted as though it rested by a cradle; The martyr laughed — it was reward enough — Purple had become like snow. The men and women on the trolley Were all carrying blossoms, going together To deck old tombs, and crumbling piles And market pits, With their lilac bunches. 33 WHEN I TURN MY BACK When I turn my back on the urban I go out into the frontiers of myself, Toward the gardens and forests That first bred me and branched me. When I turn my back on the urban I go out into the fastnesses of myself, Toward the distances and the expanses Where I am safe; where new reaches grow That make me ready for earth and body. When I turn my back on the urban I am surpassed with myself, And re-assimilated into the maw Of the many to which I must return With fresh wrestling- antenna. 34 SIMILITUDE The moon hung floating As though all the stars Were hiving round their queen-bee, And the purple parasol of heaven Curved down over like a bee-hive And shut us all in together. The squirming human swarm With its dubious gray stenches Was feeling more restless Than the one overhead. Each group was darting In its separate ways Only the one above was silently listening To the zum-zum-zum below. No one saw the queer simile Except the motor man and me — For surely his eyes followed The row of lights on either side Till they led right up To their starry doubles. He could not have missed it. I could swear he noted the parallel. 35 You've seen the pillars of the museum Lead to star-crowned suicide In the lagoon? So we both drowned ourselves In the watery blue Of super-speculation. At least I feel That he followed me in this, For he stamped on the bell impatiently And it all faded. 36 GENESIS As the bird Looks at its new laid egg furtively, And the mother Rushes to the cradle, at awaking, So yesterday's themes still fresh With the albuminous pabulum Of brain parturition and delivery, Draw me with the curiosity of a boy Looking at his new born brother. Lines are living bodies Conceived and craving nativity. Birth is no mystery to him who has^bred verses. Motherhood is only mind, And that's why men are poets most — Snatching what they lack Makes them so. Woman's a poet organically She brings forth similes of herself — Of the race: The deep pools of nurture Must flow out through something, So they choose breasts of women And brains of men. 37 STILL WAITING She sat near the back. Traces had slipped into her face That a Phidian dreamer had aimed To sketch into marble; Crowning her cheekbones Were eyes that a Raphael glimpsed When flooded with a madonna unrealizable. All the whorling grains of desire Through the wombs of centuries — Yes, through the pleistocene vortexes Of the inverse infinitudes, — Had brought her about; As many times had been made wrong combina- tions. There she sat ! Life stopped to inhale In astonishment! That had arrived Which all had waited for — The outline of full bodily loveliness. And I was there to realize it ! This top moment of time ! 38 But she was unaware. All of Time's ingrafted intimacies Wasted! The clamor of homing beauty Before its locked cote! Life's excuse for speeding up Come to naught ! I felt myself once more journeying nowhere, Cheated. So I stopped the car. 39 COMPOSITE Choice, the alchemist conjures new potions From blends too long kept separate By caste and tongues and class. Do you look down on her over there Beneath the globulous shine Of the overhead light? The purples black of some far back Grecian maid of the isles Sleeps in her hair; Forehead, laughing upward — broadening Like moonlit waters in Tyrol fastnesses — Leaves blue lakes for her eyes; Wide brows — which the bland norseland Curves to slow wonder, when too much sun Turns daylight into mystery; Irises — flashing out from behind Some granddam's witching lashes Lent by the fairies of an Irish wood; Nose — fine and dubious, high tensioned, Leading with frankish flavored accent Each sweep of the head, like a prow; 40 Lips — which for some stern Norman Spelled slowly from the Domesday book His rights — here spelled self-possession only; Cheeks — groomed where fresh winds That puff in the cherry-riping Adria, Splash their wild crimson on mating robins, too; Head — with this face sit lightly On the soft round pad between her shoulders, Where loads rested as her sires climbed the Tatra; Throat — carrying this nosegay Plucked from the races, — No wonder you swell with pride! 41 WIND BACK OF THE YARDS They come thundering down the boulder pave- ment At me, into me, These hammering, tearing winds, Lugging with them human dust And offal, — with their mixed in wealth of doings, — Fertilizing the core And plowing into life. Breath of the whirlwind in me, Where were you sown, What will you reap? Why must I be the windharp For all these racial strains, And the arranger of all these dissonants, That a nascent people shall be laid In harmonious folds And quieted as the dust on a windless day? And then must they go on and on And work and work and weary and weary And know nothing of the whirlwind that brought them into form? They come thundering down the streets At me and over me and through me 42 These wearying streaming humans. They do not know me. Why should I suffer myself to be The pavement over which they shall pass Into realization, While everyone about me sniffs And calls them the slum, the pabel? Why? Because^I loved them in their native fields, And on sunny September days helped them cut their grapes; Drank goat's milk at their hearths ; Kissed their thin babies, knew their want And their native wealth. Here they vainly strain, lost in the wilderness Of Civilization ! Let me go back with them To their own kind of woe ! 43 WILDBIRD ON THE WIRE Oh bird — How did you lose your way, Winging above the city's moaning smudge? Were you betrayed into the tangled wild of folk, By the rows of maples in the park? Or did the glistening buildings tunnelling the sky Seem like cliffs or mountain peaks With ledges of cool rest for tired wings? Or did the early wax-work filigree Of the unravelling morn Mirage the city Into a luring wilderness That promised brooks and leafing nest crotches? Or did you scent The worm, the worm — The worm that gnaws At everything? 44 ROUND AND ROUND So go, trolley wheels, And let us ride upon you And with you — now up, now down Over and under and up again! Are we not the cogs of your cogs? The rims of your rims? The reason for your rolling and arriving? Roll, seasons, roll too; Out of the lower frost lines Into the higher fires — Blazing with flowers ! Blazing with us ! Go, winds, suck the mist basins! Lift them into the mountain pockets So the thirsty sun can resuck them And throw them back into the overbrimming sea! Twist and drift, oh winds, In everlasting rounds, Until you give back seasons and flowers again To twist and drift through us! Come birds, mate and go again; Is not the longing for the perfect round of flight In the oval of your egg 45 Maddening the spaces with elipses For us to mate in, and fly in? The plan is but a game In the playground of periodicity. Our naughtiness cannot thwart it In its ever circling reiteration. Maybe the unhappy ones are those Who look for theirs outside this fixed swing. The peace of States The rhythm of the pooling races Is in the little fact That the round and round of each thing Slips no cog — while above the wheels The caravan smoothly rolls along its way. 46 TANTALUS "My eyes, my eyes, They are the great revealers!" Cried the blindman Just from under the knife. But I who have always seen Tell me, Where shall I seek for mine? "Love, love, And bodily co-ordination, This shall bring me unfoldment! ,, Cries the woman Breaking from the cage. But I who have always Swept through the vaulted abyss Where shall I go heaven hunting? 47 THE BULL'S EYE Even the palace has its farthest door And even the cathedral its pinnacle Quivering off into air waves. Even the endlessly chugging trolley Makes its final loop; But see that wondering woman On the front seat: She has no target spot, No point of sight, No plumb, No goal, No arrival; She has no nearer aim than the tangent of a comet ; And she is carrying a child. 48 THE OPTIMIST'S EGO I do not feel me travelling these rails, Elbowing the herd; For have I not been chosen to be I? Some great wise power pruned so well Through the bloom of teeming life That I am pleased with this I that I am. It picked me a keen gray firey glance To look out from the lifted mind It clothed my Self with, To glimpse all these vistas That open before me as I ride. Looking down into the cross-paths I find the source of this Me that is I (Which I adore); I see the vistas of the mother-worlds Bringing forth Fs and Fs To finally fashion just this one That fits my last and crown so perfectly. As I press forward into the expanses Down each passing avenue I look and see The radiating rows of golden paths Called for want of better names : — 49 Poetry, Art, Music — Dawning into the sun-stream Which happened to be just I ; Dressing the lambent fibers Which threaded down the pattern into Me. How perfectly they've come together; What a choice revelry of dance They carry on in Me. (Where are we passing?) So that waking they crowd my longings, And sleeping they people a world That I may roam in glory-gleaming ways. Often I meet John there And match colors with him, To prove that the heavenly streets he painted Were but the poor thoroughfares of his day, Compared with the endless crosslines And the intricate composite alleys That transport us into the glow world Of the expanded I Of my day. 50 THE RUNAWAY Why should a stranger's light touch Just skirting my sleeve Roil up all my trilling affections And set my heart bleating And leave lingering quivers round my nostrils, When I see he was only reaching to save What he held dear, and missed, Snatching me instead? The team broke rein And rushed by the car's exit As we three emerged. No one was hurt, except my fancy — For I caught the whole action: His swift leaping devotion, His self-annihilating desire to save, Was all lavished on me by mistake. She would have taken it for granted, unmoved, While I caught it, washed free from motive. The tragedy of loss lay tunnelling gulfs before me ; Swift bridges spanned them; Long reaches scaffolded themselves 51 That I might fly and take What was my own — Which had been freely offered. Did he see the look pass over me? Is that what made the man's face fall As he stumbled back to the woman At his left, sailing on in unconsciousness? A great runaway is life. 52 PAIN IN TRANSIT The drifting yellow leaves of the avenues Rush ahead and beside our wheels; They dance like brown-mad draperies And blow through me the sure cry Of autumnal quitting. The east-west boulder-laid streets With their sun risings and settings, Balance the vistas with cloudy yellows at both ends; And dead-leaf odors irrevocably whisper Of autumnal quitting. Where the brown avenues criss-cross With the leaf -dammed east- west alleys, I am teased and stumbled with dread Of autumnal quitting. 53 REVIEWING IN TRANSIT To M. B. I am not a hum-drum human. I am supping off white velvet saucers ; Flaming humming bird's wings Carry to my lips Rainbow salads, dressed with poppy oil ; But when I would taste their flashes They fly off to my ears like choral spectrums ; When, alas, I would listen To their swishing music, They slip me and dazzle my glimpses As sunglade mists Might drench the peafowl's plumage. I am vexed to tears In a joyous chase — of lines, For they fail me as wings, They mislead me as words, Blind me as visions, And smother me as songs. Come back, come back, Say it all over again, For I am not distraught — I am but reading your first volume. 54 BACH'S MELODY FOR THE G STRING Like a long breath Which settles all, It sends one wondering Down a winding river path; The blurred muttering of the water Echoes through the rattle of the leaves ; Then over and over the bow dips To the dull thrumming G Of the twisted silver string. The willow dips to the wave, The wire soughs the under-toned current, The wind sighs alto, while the wiley bow Wriggles through a never ending air. I, who can only sleep and go And eat and worry; who can only At sudden intervals Rise above that dull G — How you irritate me with that dipping To what I would escape! 55 Let your teasings, up and down, That would be jigs, go on and on, But stop that dipping, Johan Sebastian! Leave that to us who have no upper score; Whose thoughts can never 'Scape the lisping alphabet To wade out into the swallowing depth of tone Where G is the molten oil of melody And not the misery of a beached heart That knows no ocean of song. 56 THAT SOMEONE Would he enter at some unexpected corner — That Someone, — who somewhere stole Into the crooning world, When dark silence challenged eye and ear — When the far-fetched particles Met in atomistic flight, And clasped in fresh floods of flight To fashion him? Would he come — That Someone — who should span and iridize the gulf Between the earth and heaven, for me; And charge the interspaces Twixt soul and body for me? The door opens. Is it he — That Someone who shall sense the infinite calculus Of the never ceasing pulse Which carries life — can carries it to me? That Someone whose lavish glance could throw The worthwhile golden thread Upon which these twitching pearls are strung, Which make the next beat of my heart Quite safe and longed for? 57 Should he come, — £ at Someone, And be caught in the infinite mesh My soul throws out, And trembling fuse his affluence with mine — 'Twould start another spasm In the earth and sea and sky- To match the flying grains For another try at soul-building. Fixed in a plastic continuity Should that someone pour his full glass for me — Would we realize each in each A realm making for life without a blot or stop? Can I be watching the door to catch This vaguest shadow of the comrade-stuff My human need must crave? And should that Someone enter Could I ever doubt again The value of the poorest touch-point Which two charged souls might stablish And bring the spark — defying poet, priest and alchemist? 58 CONSTANCY Some stars there be that fall And some that stay; Some days that are remembered And some that will not pass — That's my little life. But the dumb hours Shall sift into weeks And the dripping years with constancy Shall wear away the world Till the waiting shadows swallow it — I'll meet you there. 59 JUST AS LIEF Beloved, shall I love you madly, As in the high sun The forest panther loves her young? Or shall I love you sanely As the coy pink of the grayish ball that was the hot sun of noonday, Pours its last glow over the disintegrating city? Or shall I just flood about you, adding a haze, To the majesty of the stupendous outline In which you palpatantly swim? Or shall I follow after, reflecting, As does the lady moon, In dry, dull, saffron, dusty, sultry yellow? Choose, for I can do all or either: Crush you or cozy you ; flood you or reflect you ; For am I not a woman? 60 SILENCES In the roar of the traffic I feel myself engulfed in silence Like the silence in the soul of a cannon. Did you ever think What an awful silence there must have been Just after the world was clashed forth? And if there was a roaring God-voice Asking aught of it, Has it answered to this day? And then — There is that other quenching silence When adrift I ask: "Whence came I and whither do I go?" Nothing ever answers it, And the asking voice Dies not even to an echo's wasted form. Upon the brink of these questioning silences Must I ever skim along Afloat in the drowning thunder of it all? 61 And this life that I love Moves breathing all about me, Waiting in hushed leash, holding back the answer. Will the myriads that travel with me Deafened to the same silences Stifle even my question into stillness? MOTORY Flash, and the rush and fire Flow through the living wire Till they reach me — Then rage under skin and flesh. The herds of the swirling desire — Through the overhead quivering wire When I reach them, I'll catch in the self -same mesh. 62 FRESH FIELDS Let's play and feed Upon the meadow, The passing meadow that stretches Through the royal town — From end to end, the meadow of Impervious lives that writhe And graze and bloom and beat Through the gray-greenish edges of the city. I find it a veritable meadow Full of refreshment, Where my heart can stretch And lave itself after unscrolling From the cramp of self-fulfillment And petty love; And cool its hot flashes In a wind that has blown itself chill Through the gray-greenish edges of the city. 63 MY COUNTRY 'TIS OF THEE In Mark White Square In folk song chorus they were singing: Full-voiced, like saga-women Might thunder prophesy: And this singing foretold A race of singers would be born, Mixed from all the bloods that sing; It would have a singing fatherland And a singing mother tongue; It would weave all the words Of all the people Into one song; And queerest folk In farthest valleys Should feel the tug Of this song. And O, My Country, 'twas of you These singers sang This singing prophesy ! 64 SCULPT And the man said: "Shall I go on and on Gathering this raw material Which the man-and-woman life Has heaped for me, And let high wrought sensibilities Ravel me out into feelings And heap them up with a fumbled handprint Regretting? "No, I have lived enough to draw on; I have battered me a chisel into shape; I will carve myself Into a result for Art." The man submitted his effort; Then plastically stretched his arms, And received the nails of technique In his palms — all itching to sculp. 65 RIVALS A pretty November day Passed in crisp crinolin sunshine; It was the eleventh of the family. And a flaming red July day Passed on the other side — It was the fourth child of that family. And the little chill day Blushed hot in jealousy For they knew each other's history. 66 HALSTED SILHOUETTE Face against the pane — Child's face, Watching the flying pavements Filled with flocking, scheming, gripping Blocks and blocks Of Folks and Things- Two millstones to pinch that little face between. Keep it close to the pane, baby; Windows are everywhere, So look busily through them. The jam will move you on and along, So gaze out and ahead Ever — little face — The poets are awaiting your seeings. 67 IMAGINATION AND TRAVEL In the little home garden, Before I knew the far-pathed world, I gathered it out of the mists of distance, Dragged its purple back to gray And unpacked it into the golden space Of my childhood; I toyed with its splendors Its palaces and ruins, As a boy might untangle What's gathered in his pocket. And I have since mused upon it all; For the world, unravelled Into my travel-weary eyes, Has never seemed so real a world. I find it but a scattered group Of stone-piles, forests, stretches, Cities flying past; and faces, Faces, faces, faces, dubiously peering From an edgeless sky. 68 NEW TO HIM We were going home to the South Side He ventured to read me some lines, Bold precise arguments Like a brief, presenting his own case To the supreme court. They told of the new life-line Which he would fling to men; They told of the new democracy Which he had dared to dream; They told in floods and torrents That were over-flooding his own debris, And finally running clear, How a new republic shall arise. He wrestled these arguments himself With swelling biceps And taut backbone. I slapped him on the shoulder, Figuratively, and under my breath Said something like "Bully for you!" — Not exactly that, for I am too much of a lady. At any rate I gloried in him; Not so young either, to be in such a fever Of salvation jaundice. 69 We all had it younger. It didn't seem to set us prattling Half so much as it set us working. It didn't make us sleek and successful, It kept us ragged And walking to save carfare. It didn't make us the idol of a group, It left us shunned As though a slight madness Had better not be encouraged. It set us, not defying Time To produce these new boys and girls For this new order, But to roll up sleeves and produce them ourselves, It put some of us into the slime pits In Leavenworth — something to write And lecture about afterwards. But, dear boy, keep the safe path; Tell stories plastered to pages In broken lines and aeroplaned expressions; We need you — For we are only the trolley track And you the overhead wire, maybe. The Conductor uses us both To make the goal. 70 STAR DRAWN Ride the sky, my vaulting steed, Lashed abreast with fire and wind! Wheel ahead, With your nose on the thrill That rushes From the mother bed of the worlds To carry My worm to the stars. 71 VERILY, VERILY O let me go out into the sun Of tomorrow As the moth flies for just a day! 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