Part 2

My wife is young, yes she is young and pretty when she cares to be--when she is interested in a discussion: it is the little dancing mayor's wife telling her of the Day nursery in East Rutherford, 'cross the track, divided from us by the railroad--and disputes as to precedence. It is in this town the saloon flourishes, the saloon of my friend on the right whose wife has twice offended with chance words. Her English is atrocious! It is in this town that the saloon is situated, close to the railroad track, close as may be, this side being dry, dry, dry: two people listening on opposite sides of a wall!--The Day Nursery had sixty-five babies the week before last, so my wife's eyes shine and her cheeks are pink and I cannot see a blemish.

Ice-cream in the shape of flowers and domestic objects: a pipe for me since I do not smoke, a doll for you.

The figure of some great bulk of a woman disappearing into the kitchen with a quick look over the shoulder. My friend on the left who has spent the whole day in a car the like of which some old fellow would give to an actress: flower-holders, mirrors, curtains, plush seats--my friend on the left who is chairman of the Streets committee of the town council--and who has spent the whole day studying automobile fire-engines in neighbouring towns in view of purchase,--my friend, at the Elks last week at the breaking-up hymn, signalled for them to let Bill--a familiar friend of the saloon-keeper--sing out all alone to the organ--and he did sing!

Salz-rolls, exquisite! and Rhine wine _ad libitum_. A masterly caviare sandwich.

The children flitting about above stairs. The councilman has just bought a National eight--some car!

For heaven's sake I mustn't forget the halves of green peppers stuffed with cream cheese and whole walnuts!

THURSDAY

I have had my dream--like others-- and it has come to nothing, so that I remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky-- feeling my clothes about me, the weight of my body in my shoes, the rim of my hat, air passing in and out at my nose--and decide to dream no more.

THE DARK DAY

A three-day-long rain from the east-- an interminable talking, talking of no consequence--patter, patter, patter. Hand in hand little winds blow the thin streams aslant. Warm. Distance cut off. Seclusion. A few passers-by, drawn in upon themselves, hurry from one place to another. Winds of the white poppy! there is no escape!-- An interminable talking, talking, talking ... it has happened before. Backward, backward, backward.

TIME THE HANGMAN

Poor old Abner, old white-haired nigger! I remember when you were so strong you hung yourself by a rope round the neck in Doc Hollister's barn to prove you could beat the faker in the circus--and it didn't kill you. Now your face is in your hands, and your elbows are on your knees, and you are silent and broken.

TO A FRIEND

Well, Lizzie Anderson! seventeen men--and the baby hard to find a father for!

What will the good Father in Heaven say to the local judge if he do not solve this problem? A little two pointed smile and--pouff!-- the law is changed into a mouthful of phrases.

THE GENTLE MAN

I feel the caress of my own fingers on my own neck as I place my collar and think pityingly of the kind women I have known.

THE SOUGHING WIND

Some leaves hang late, some fall before the first frost--so goes the tale of winter branches and old bones.

SPRING

O my grey hairs! You are truly white as plum blossoms.

PLAY

Subtle, clever brain, wiser than I am, by what devious means do you contrive to remain idle? Teach me, O master.

LINES

Leaves are greygreen, the glass broken, bright green.

THE POOR

By constantly tormenting them with reminders of the lice in their children's hair, the School Physician first brought their hatred down on him, But by this familiarity they grew used to him, and so, at last, took him for their friend and adviser.

COMPLETE DESTRUCTION

It was an icy day. We buried the cat, then took her box and set fire to it in the back yard. Those fleas that escaped earth and fire died by the cold.

MEMORY OF APRIL

You say love is this, love is that: Poplar tassels, willow tendrils the wind and the rain comb, tinkle and drip, tinkle and drip-- branches drifting apart. Hagh! Love has not even visited this country.

EPITAPH

An old willow with hollow branches slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils and sang:

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge.

DAISY

The dayseye hugging the earth in August, ha! Spring is gone down in purple, weeds stand high in the corn, the rainbeaten furrow is clotted with sorrel and crabgrass, the branch is black under the heavy mass of the leaves-- The sun is upon a slender green stem ribbed lengthwise. He lies on his back-- it is a woman also-- he regards his former majesty and round the yellow center, split and creviced and done into minute flowerheads, he sends out his twenty rays--a little and the wind is among them to grow cool there!

One turns the thing over in his hand and looks at it from the rear: brownedged, green and pointed scales armor his yellow. But turn and turn, the crisp petals remain brief, translucent, greenfastened, barely touching at the edges: blades of limpid seashell.

PRIMROSE

Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow! It is not a color. It is summer! It is the wind on a willow, the lap of waves, the shadow under a bush, a bird, a bluebird, three herons, a dead hawk rotting on a pole-- Clear yellow! It is a piece of blue paper in the grass or a threecluster of green walnuts swaying, children playing croquet or one boy fishing, a man swinging his pink fists as he walks-- It is ladysthumb, forgetmenots in the ditch, moss under the flange of the carrail, the wavy lines in split rock, a great oaktree-- It is a disinclination to be five red petals or a rose, it is a cluster of birdsbreast flowers on a red stem six feet high, four open yellow petals above sepals curled backward into reverse spikes-- Tufts of purple grass spot the green meadow and clouds the sky.

QUEEN-ANN'S-LACE

Her body is not so white as anemony petals nor so smooth--nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force; the grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be, with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand's span of her whiteness. Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish. Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over-- or nothing.

GREAT MULLEN

One leaves his leaves at home being a mullen and sends up a lighthouse to peer from: I will have my way, yellow--A mast with a lantern, ten fifty, a hundred, smaller and smaller as they grow more--Liar, liar, liar! You come from her! I can smell djer-kiss on your clothes. Ha, ha! you come to me, you--I am a point of dew on a grass-stem. Why are you sending heat down on me from your lantern--You are cowdung, a dead stick with the bark off. She is squirting on us both. She has had her hand on you!--Well?--She has defiled ME.--Your leaves are dull, thick and hairy.--Every hair on my body will hold you off from me. You are a dungcake, birdlime on a fencerail.-- I love you, straight, yellow finger of God pointing to--her! Liar, broken weed, duncake, you have-- I am a cricket waving his antenae and you are high, grey and straight. Ha!

WAITING

When I am alone I am happy. The air is cool. The sky is flecked and splashed and wound with color. The crimson phalloi of the sassafrass leaves hang crowded before me in shoals on the heavy branches. When I reach my doorstep I am greeted by the happy shrieks of my children and my heart sinks. I am crushed.

Are not my children as dear to me as falling leaves or must one become stupid to grow older? It seems much as if Sorrow had tripped up my heels. Let us see, let us see! What did I plan to say to her when it should happen to me as it has happened now?

THE HUNTER

In the flashes and black shadows of July the days, locked in each other's arms, seem still so that squirrels and colored birds go about at ease over the branches and through the air.

Where will a shoulder split or a forehead open and victory be?

Nowhere. Both sides grow older.

And you may be sure not one leaf will lift itself from the ground and become fast to a twig again.

ARRIVAL

And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind...!

TO A FRIEND CONCERNING SEVERAL LADIES

You know there is not much that I desire, a few crysanthemums half lying on the grass, yellow and brown and white, the talk of a few people, the trees, an expanse of dried leaves perhaps with ditches among them. But there comes between me and these things a letter or even a look--well placed, you understand, so that I am confused, twisted four ways and--left flat, unable to lift the food to my own mouth: Here is what they say: Come! and come! and come! And if I do not go I remain stale to myself and if I go-- I have watched the city from a distance at night and wondered why I wrote no poem. Come! yes, the city is ablaze for you and you stand and look at it.

And they are right. There is no good in the world except out of a woman and certain women alone for certain things. But what if I arrive like a turtle with my house on my back or a fish ogling from under water? It will not do. I must be steaming with love, colored like a flamingo. For what? To have legs and a silly head and to smell, pah! like a flamingo that soils its own feathers behind. Must I go home filled with a bad poem? And they say: Who can answer these things till he has tried? Your eyes are half closed, you are a child, oh, a sweet one, ready to play but I will make a man of you and with love on his shoulder--!

And in the marshes the crickets run on the sunny dike's top and make burrows there, the water reflects the reeds and the reeds move on their stalks and rattle drily.

YOUTH AND BEAUTY

I bought a dishmop-- having no daughter-- for they had twisted fine ribbons of shining copper about white twine and made a towsled head of it, fastened it upon a turned ash stick slender at the neck straight, tall-- when tied upright on the brass wallbracket to be a light for me-- and naked, as a girl should seem to her father.

THE THINKER

My wife's new pink slippers have gay pom-poms. There is not a spot or a stain on their satin toes or their sides. All night they lie together under her bed's edge. Shivering I catch sight of them and smile, in the morning. Later I watch them descending the stair, hurrying through the doors and round the table, moving stiffly with a shake of their gay pom-poms! And I talk to them in my secret mind out of pure happiness.

THE DISPUTANTS

Upon the table in their bowl in violent disarray of yellow sprays, green spikes of leaves, red pointed petals and curled heads of blue and white among the litter of the forks and crumbs and plates the flowers remain composed. Cooly their colloquy continues above the coffee and loud talk grown frail as vaudeville.

TULIP BED

The May sun--whom all things imitate-- that glues small leaves to the wooden trees shone from the sky through bluegauze clouds upon the ground. Under the leafy trees where the suburban streets lay crossed, with houses on each corner, tangled shadows had begun to join the roadway and the lawns. With excellent precision the tulip bed inside the iron fence upreared its gaudy yellow, white and red, rimmed round with grass, reposedly.

THE BIRDS

The world begins again! Not wholly insufflated the blackbirds in the rain upon the dead topbranches of the living tree, stuck fast to the low clouds, notate the dawn. Their shrill cries sound announcing appetite and drop among the bending roses and the dripping grass.

THE NIGHTINGALES

My shoes as I lean unlacing them stand out upon flat worsted flowers under my feet. Nimbly the shadows of my fingers play unlacing over shoes and flowers.

SPOUTS

In this world of as fine a pair of breasts as ever I saw the fountain in Madison Square spouts up of water a white tree that dies and lives as the rocking water in the basin turns from the stonerim back upon the jet and rising there reflectively drops down again.

BLUEFLAGS

I stopped the car to let the children down where the streets end in the sun at the marsh edge and the reeds begin and there are small houses facing the reeds and the blue mist in the distance with grapevine trellises with grape clusters small as strawberries on the vines and ditches running springwater that continue the gutters with willows over them. The reeds begin like water at a shore their pointed petals waving dark green and light. But blueflags are blossoming in the reeds which the children pluck chattering in the reeds high over their heads which they part with bare arms to appear with fists of flowers till in the air there comes the smell of calamus from wet, gummy stalks.

THE WIDOW'S LAMENT IN SPRINGTIME

Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year. Thirtyfive years I lived with my husband. The plumtree is white today with masses of flowers. Masses of flowers load the cherry branches and color some bushes yellow and some red but the grief in my heart is stronger than they for though they were my joy formerly, today I notice them and turn away forgetting. Today my son told me that in the meadows, at the edge of the heavy woods in the distance, he saw trees of white flowers. I feel that I would like to go there and fall into those flowers and sink into the marsh near them.

LIGHT HEARTED WILLIAM

Light hearted William twirled his November moustaches and, half dressed, looked from the bedroom window upon the spring weather.

Heigh-ya! sighed he gaily leaning out to see up and down the street where a heavy sunlight lay beyond some blue shadows.

Into the room he drew his head again and laughed to himself quietly twirling his green moustaches.

PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR

The birches are mad with green points the wood's edge is burning with their green, burning, seething--No, no, no. The birches are opening their leaves one by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold and separate, one by one. Slender tassels hang swaying from the delicate branch tips-- Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word. Black is split at once into flowers. In every bog and ditch, flares of small fire, white flowers!--Agh, the birches are mad, mad with their green. The world is gone, torn into shreds with this blessing. What have I left undone that I should have undertaken

O my brother, you redfaced, living man ignorant, stupid whose feet are upon this same dirt that I touch--and eat. We are alone in this terror, alone, face to face on this road, you and I, wrapped by this flame! Let the polished plows stay idle, their gloss already on the black soil. But that face of yours--! Answer me. I will clutch you. I will hug you, grip you. I will poke my face into your face and force you to see me. Take me in your arms, tell me the commonest thing that is in your mind to say, say anything. I will understand you--! It is the madness of the birch leaves opening cold, one by one.

My rooms will receive me. But my rooms are no longer sweet spaces where comfort is ready to wait on me with its crumbs. A darkness has brushed them. The mass of yellow tulips in the bowl is shrunken. Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed. I am shaken, broken against a might that splits comfort, blows apart my careful partitions, crushes my house and leaves me--with shrinking heart and startled, empty eyes--peering out into a cold world.

In the spring I would drink! In the spring I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things. Your face! Give me your face, Yang Kue Fei! your hands, your lips to drink! Give me your wrists to drink-- I drag you, I am drowned in you, you overwhelm me! Drink! Save me! The shad bush is in the edge of the clearing. The yards in a fury of lilac blossoms are driving me mad with terror. Drink and lie forgetting the world.

And coldly the birch leaves are opening one by one. Coldly I observe them and wait for the end. And it ends.

THE LONELY STREET

School is over. It is too hot to walk at ease. At ease in light frocks they walk the streets to while the time away. They have grown tall. They hold pink flames in their right hands. In white from head to foot, with sidelong, idle look-- in yellow, floating stuff, black sash and stockings-- touching their avid mouths with pink sugar on a stick-- like a carnation each holds in her hand-- they mount the lonely street.

THE GREAT FIGURE

Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving with weight and urgency tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.