‘SOUR GRAPES’
A Book of Poems
BOSTON
The Four Seas Company
1921
Copyright, 1921, by
The Four Seas Company
The Four Seas Press
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
To
ALFRED KREYMBORG
Certain of the poems in this book have appeared in the magazines: Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, The Egoist, The Little Review, The Dial, Others, and Contact.
| Page | |
| the Late Singer | 11 |
| March | 12 |
| Berket and the Stars | 17 |
| A Celebration | 18 |
| April | 21 |
| A Goodnight | 22 |
| Overture to a Dance of Locomotives | 24 |
| Romance Moderne | 26 |
| The Desolate Field | 30 |
| Willow Poem | 31 |
| Approach of Winter | 32 |
| January | 33 |
| Blizzard | 34 |
| To Waken an Old Lady | 35 |
| Winter Trees | 36 |
| Complaint | 37 |
| The Cold Night | 38 |
| Spring Storm | 39 |
| The Delicacies | 40 |
| Thursday | 43 |
| The Dark Day | 44 |
| Time, the Hangman | 45 |
| To a Friend | 46 |
| The Gentle Man | 47 |
| The Soughing Wind | 48 |
| Spring | 49 |
| Play | 50 |
| Lines | 51 |
| The Poor | 52 |
| Complete Destruction | 53 |
| Memory of April | 54 |
| Epitaph | 55 |
| Daisy | 56 |
| Primrose | 57 |
| Queen-Ann’s-Lace | 58 |
| Great Mullen | 59 |
| Waiting | 60 |
| The Hunter | 61 |
| Arrival | 62 |
| To a Friend Concerning Several Ladies | 63 |
| Youth and Beauty | 65 |
| The Thinker | 66 |
| The Disputants | 67 |
| The Tulip Bed | 68 |
| The Birds | 69 |
| The Nightingales | 70 |
| Spouts | 71 |
| Blueflags | 72 |
| The Widow’s Lament in Springtime | 73 |
| Light Hearted William | 74 |
| Portrait of the Author | 75 |
| The Lonely Street | 77 |
| The Great Figure | 78 |
| Here it is spring again and I still a young man! I am late at my singing. The sparrow with the black rain on his breast has been at his cadenzas for two weeks past: What is it that is dragging at my heart? The grass by the back door is stiff with sap. The old maples are opening their branches of brown and yellow moth-flowers. A moon hangs in the blue in the early afternoons over the marshes. I am late at my singing. |
| I |
| Winter is long in this climate and spring—a matter of a few days only,—a flower or two picked from mud or from among wet leaves or at best against treacherous bitterness of wind, and sky shining teasingly, then closing in black and sudden, with fierce jaws. |
| II |
|
March, you remind me of the pyramids, our pyramids— stript of the polished stone that used to guard them! March, you are like Fra Angelico at Fiesole, painting on plaster! March, you are like a band of young poets that have not learned the blessedness of warmth (or have forgotten it). At any rate— I am moved to write poetry for the warmth there is in it and for the loneliness— a poem that shall have you in it March. |
| [Pg 13] |
| III |
| See! Ashur-ban-i-pal, the archer king, on horse-back, in blue and yellow enamel! with drawn bow—facing lions standing on their hind legs, fangs bared! his shafts bristling in their necks! Sacred bulls—dragons in embossed brickwork marching—in four tiers— along the sacred way to Nebuchadnezzar’s throne hall! They shine in the sun, they that have been marching— marching under the dust of ten thousand dirt years. Now— they are coming into bloom again! See them! marching still, bared by the storms from my calendar —winds that blow back the sand! winds that enfilade dirt! winds that by strange craft have whipt up a black army that by pick and shovel bare a procession to the god, Marduk! Natives cursing and digging [Pg 14]for pay unearth dragons with upright tails and sacred bulls alternately— in four tiers— lining the way to an old altar! Natives digging at old walls— digging me warmth—digging me sweet loneliness— high enamelled walls. |
| IV |
| My second spring— passed in a monastery with plaster walls—in Fiesole on the hill above Florence. My second spring—painted a virgin—in a blue aureole sitting on a three-legged stool, arms crossed— she is intently serious, and still watching an angel with coloured wings half kneeling before her— and smiling—the angel’s eyes holding the eyes of Mary as a snake’s holds a bird’s. On the ground there are flowers, trees are in leaf. |
| V |
|
But! now for the battle! Now for murder—now for the real thing! [Pg 15]My third springtime is approaching! Winds! lean, serious as a virgin, seeking, seeking the flowers of March. Seeking flowers nowhere to be found, they twine among the bare branches in insatiable eagerness— they whirl up the snow seeking under it— they—the winds—snakelike roar among yellow reeds seeking flowers—flowers. I spring among them seeking one flower in which to warm myself! I deride with all the ridicule of misery— my own starved misery. Counter-cutting winds strike against me refreshing their fury! Come, good, cold fellows! Have we no flowers? Defy then with even more desperation than ever—being lean and frozen! But though you are lean and frozen— [Pg 16]think of the blue bulls of Babylon. Fling yourselves upon their empty roses— cut savagely! But— think of the painted monastery at Fiesole. |
| A day on the boulevards chosen out of ten years of student poverty! One best day out of ten good ones. Berket in high spirits—“Ha, oranges! Let’s have one!” And he made to snatch an orange from the vender’s cart. Now so clever was the deception, so nicely timed to the full sweep of certain wave summits, that the rumor of the thing has come down through three generations—which is relatively forever! |
| A middle-northern March, now as always— gusts from the south broken against cold winds— but from under, as if a slow hand lifted a tide, it moves—not into April—into a second March, the old skin of wind-clear scales dropping upon the mould: this is the shadow projects the tree upward causing the sun to shine in his sphere. So we will put on our pink felt hat—new last year! —newer this by virtue of brown eyes turning back the seasons—and let us walk to the orchid-house, see the flowers will take the prize to-morrow at the Palace. Stop here, these are our oleanders. When they are in bloom— You would waste words It is clearer to me than if the pink were on the branch. It would be a searching in a coloured cloud to reveal that which now, huskless, shows the very reason for their being. And these the orange-trees, in blossom—no need to tell with this weight of perfume in the air. If it were not so dark in this shed one could better see the white. It is that very perfume has drawn the darkness down among the leaves. Do I speak clearly enough? It is this darkness reveals that which darkness alone loosens and sets spinning on waxen wings— not the touch of a finger-tip, not the motion of a sigh. A too heavy sweetness proves [Pg 19]its own caretaker. And here are the orchids! Never having seen such gaiety I will read these flowers for you: This is an odd January, died—in Villon’s time. Snow, this is and this the stain of a violet grew in that place the spring that foresaw its own doom. And this, a certain July from Iceland: a young woman of that place breathed it toward the south. It took root there. The colour ran true but the plant is small. This falling spray of snowflakes is a handful of dead Februarys prayed into flower by Rafael Arevalo Martinez of Guatemala. Here’s that old friend who went by my side so many years: this full, fragile head of veined lavender. Oh that April that we first went with our stiff lusts leaving the city behind, out to the green hill— May, they said she was. A hand for all of us: this branch of blue butterflies tied to this stem. June is a yellow cup I’ll not name; August the over-heavy one. And here are— russet and shiny, all but March. And March? Ah, March— Flowers are a tiresome pastime. One has a wish to shake them from their pots [Pg 20]root and stern, for the sun to gnaw. Walk out again into the cold and saunter home to the fire. This day has blossomed long enough. I have wiped out the red night and lit a blaze instead which will at least warm our hands and stir up the talk. I think we have kept fair time. Time is a green orchid. |
| If you had come away with me into another state we had been quiet together. But there the sun coming up out of the nothing beyond the lake was too low in the sky, there was too great a pushing against him, too much of sumac buds, pink in the head with the clear gum upon them, too many opening hearts of lilac leaves, too many, too many swollen limp poplar tassels on the bare branches! It was too strong in the air. I had no rest against that springtime! The pounding of the hoofs on the raw sods stayed with me half through the night. I awoke smiling but tired. |
| Go to sleep—though of course you will not— to tideless waves thundering slantwise against strong embankments, rattle and swish of spray dashed thirty feet high, caught by the lake wind, scattered and strewn broadcast in over the steady car rails! Sleep, sleep! Gulls’ cries in a wind-gust broken by the wind; calculating wings set above the field of waves breaking. Go to sleep to the lunge between foam-crests, refuse churned in the recoil. Food! Food! Offal! Offal! that holds them in the air, wave-white for the one purpose, feather upon feather, the wild chill in their eyes, the hoarseness in their voices— sleep, sleep.... Gentlefooted crowds are treading out your lullaby. Their arms nudge, they brush shoulders, hitch this way then that, mass and surge at the crossings— lullaby, lullaby! The wild-fowl police whistles, the enraged roar of the traffic, machine shrieks: it is all to put you to sleep, to soften your limbs in relaxed postures, and that your head slip sidewise, and your hair loosen and fall over your eyes and over your mouth, brushing your lips wistfully that you may dream, sleep and dream— A black fungus springs out about lonely church doors— sleep, sleep. The Night, coming down upon the wet boulevard, would start you awake with his message, to have in at your window. Pay no heed to him. He storms at your sill with [Pg 23]cooings, with gesticulations, curses! You will not let him in. He would keep you from sleeping. He would have you sit under your desk lamp brooding, pondering; he would have you slide out the drawer, take up the ornamented dagger and handle it. It is late, it is nineteen-nineteen— go to sleep, his cries are a lullaby; his jabbering is a sleep-well-my-baby; he is a crackbrained messenger. The maid waking you in the morning when you are up and dressing, the rustle of your clothes as you raise them— it is the same tune. At table the cold, greenish, split grapefruit, its juice on the tongue, the clink of the spoon in your coffee, the toast odors say it over and over. The open street-door lets in the breath of the morning wind from over the lake. The bus coming to a halt grinds from its sullen brakes— lullaby, lullaby. The crackle of a newspaper, the movement of the troubled coat beside you— sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.... It is the sting of snow, the burning liquor of the moonlight, the rush of rain in the gutters packed with dead leaves: go to sleep, go to sleep. And the night passes—and never passes— |
| I |
| Men with picked voices chant the names of cities in a huge gallery: promises that pull through descending stairways to a deep rumbling. The rubbing feet of those coming to be carried quicken a grey pavement into soft light that rocks to and fro, under the domed ceiling, across and across from pale earthcoloured walls of bare limestone. Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever. A leaning pyramid of sunlight, narrowing out at a high window, moves by the clock: disaccordant hands straining out from a center: inevitable postures infinitely repeated— |
| II |
| Two—twofour—twoeight! Porters in red hats run on narrow platforms. This way ma’m! —important not to take the wrong train! Lights from the concrete [Pg 25]ceiling hang crooked but— Poised horizontal on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders packed with a warm glow—inviting entry— pull against the hour. But brakes can hold a fixed posture till— The whistle! Not twoeight. Not twofour. Two! Gliding windows. Colored cooks sweating in a small kitchen. Taillights— In time: twofour! In time: twoeight! —rivers are tunneled: trestles cross oozy swampland: wheels repeating the same gesture remain relatively stationary: rails forever parallel return on themselves infinitely. The dance is sure. |
| Tracks of rain and light linger in the spongy greens of a nature whose flickering mountain—bulging nearer, ebbing back into the sun hollowing itself away to hold a lake,— or brown stream rising and falling at the roadside, turning about, churning itself white, drawing green in over it,—plunging glassy funnels fall— And—the other world— the windshield a blunt barrier: Talk to me. Sh! they would hear us. —the backs of their heads facing us— The stream continues its motion of a hound running over rough ground. Trees vanish—reappear—vanish: detached dance of gnomes—as a talk dodging remarks, glows and fades. —The unseen power of words— And now that a few of the moves are clear the first desire is to fling oneself out at the side into the other dance, to other music. Peer Gynt. Rip Van Winkle. Diana. If I were young I would try a new alignment— alight nimbly from the car, Good-bye!— Childhood companions linked two and two criss-cross: four, three, two, one. Back into self, tentacles withdrawn. Feel about in warm self-flesh. [Pg 27]Since childhood, since childhood! Childhood is a toad in the garden, a happy toad. All toads are happy and belong in gardens. A toad to Diana! Lean forward. Punch the steersman behind the ear. Twirl the wheel! Over the edge! Screams! Crash! The end. I sit above my head— a little removed—or a thin wash of rain on the roadway —I am never afraid when he is driving,— interposes new direction, rides us sidewise, unforseen into the ditch! All threads cut! Death! Black. The end. The very end— I would sit separate weighing a small red handful: the dirt of these parts, sliding mists sheeting the alders against the touch of fingers creeping to mine. All stuff of the blind emotions. But—stirred, the eye seizes for the first time—The eye awake!— anything, a dirt bank with green stars of scrawny weed flattened upon it under a weight of air—For the first time!— or a yawning depth: Big! Swim around in it, through it— all directions and find vitreous seawater stuff— God how I love you!—or, as I say, a plunge into the ditch. The end. I sit examining my red handful. Balancing —this—in and out—agh. Love you? It’s [Pg 28]a fire in the blood, willy-nilly! It’s the sun coming up in the morning. Ha, but it’s the grey moon too, already up in the morning. You are slow. Men are not friends where it concerns a woman? Fighters. Playfellows. White round thighs! Youth! Sighs—! It’s the fillip of novelty. It’s— Mountains. Elephants humping along against the sky—indifferent to light withdrawing its tattered shreds, worn out with embraces. It’s the fillip of novelty. It’s a fire in the blood. Oh get a flannel shirt, white flannel or pongee. You’d look so well! I married you because I liked your nose. I wanted you! I wanted you in spite of all they’d say— Rain and light, mountain and rain, rain and river. Will you love me always? —A car overturned and two crushed bodies under it.—Always! Always! And the white moon already up. White. Clean. All the colors. A good head, backed by the eye—awake! backed by the emotions—blind— River and mountain, light and rain—or rain, rock, light, trees—divided: rain-light counter rocks-trees or trees counter rain-light-rocks or— Myriads of counter processions crossing and recrossing, regaining the advantage, buying here, selling there [Pg 29]—You are sold cheap everywhere in town!— lingering, touching fingers, withdrawing gathering forces into blares, hummocks, peaks and rivers—river meeting rock —I wish that you were lying there dead and I sitting here beside you.— It’s the grey moon—over and over. It’s the clay of these parts. |
| Vast and grey, the sky is a simulacrum to all but him whose days are vast and grey, and— In the tall, dried grasses a goat stirs with nozzle searching the ground. —my head is in the air but who am I...? And amazed my heart leaps at the thought of love vast and grey yearning silently over me. |
| It is a willow when summer is over, a willow by the river from which no leaf has fallen nor bitten by the sun turned orange or crimson. The leaves cling and grow paler, swing and grow paler over the swirling waters of the river as if loath to let go, they are so cool, so drunk with the swirl of the wind and of the river— oblivious to winter, the last to let go and fall into the water and on the ground. |
| The half stripped trees struck by a wind together, bending all, the leaves flutter drily and refuse to let go or driven like hail stream bitterly out to one side and fall where the salvias, hard carmine,— like no leaf that ever was— edge the bare garden. |
| Again I reply to the triple winds running chromatic fifths of derision outside my window: Play louder. You will not succeed. I am bound more to my sentences the more you batter at me to follow you. And the wind, as before, fingers perfectly its derisive music. |
| Snow: years of anger following hours that float idly down— the blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun! a clutter of yellow and blue flakes— Hairy looking trees stand out in long alleys over a wild solitude. The man turns and there— his solitary track stretched out upon the world. |
| Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffetted by a dark wind— But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested, the snow is covered with broken seedhusks and the wind tempered by a shrill piping of plenty. |
| All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold. |
| They call me and I go It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks. The door opens. I smile, enter and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy! Night is a room darkened for lovers, through the jalousies the sun has sent one gold needle! I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion. |
| It is cold. The white moon is up among her scattered stars— like the bare thighs of the Police Seargent’s wife—among her five children.... No answer. Pale shadows lie upon the frosted grass. One answer: It is midnight, it is still and it is cold...! White thighs of the sky! a new answer out of the depths of my male belly: In April.... In April I shall see again—In April! the round and perfect thighs of the Police Sergent’s wife perfect still after many babies. Oya! |
| The sky has given over its bitterness. Out of the dark change all day long rain falls and falls as if it would never end. Still the snow keeps its hold on the ground. But water, water from a thousand runnels! It collects swiftly, dappled with black cuts a way for itself through green ice in the gutters. Drop after drop it falls from the withered grass-stems of the overhanging embankment. |
| The hostess, in pink satin and blond hair—dressed high—shone beautifully in her white slippers against the great silent bald head of her little-eyed husband! Raising a glass of yellow Rhine wine in the narrow space just beyond the light-varnished woodwork and the decorative column between dining-room and hall, she smiled the smile of water tumbling from one ledge to another. We began with a herring salad: delicately flavoured saltiness in scallops of lettuce-leaves. The little owl-eyed and thick-set lady with masses of grey hair has smooth pink cheeks without a wrinkle. She cannot be the daughter of the little red-faced fellow dancing about inviting lion-headed Wolff the druggist to play the piano! But she is. Wolff is a terrific smoker: if the telephone goes off at night—so his curled-haired wife whispers—he rises from bed but cannot answer till he has lighted a cigarette. Sherry wine in little conical glasses, dull brownish yellow, and tomatoes stuffed with finely cut chicken and mayonnaise! The tall Irishman in a Prince Albert and the usual striped trousers is going to sing for us. (The piano is in a little alcove with dark curtains.) The hostess’s sister—ten years younger than she—in black net and velvet, has hair like some filmy haystack, cloudy about [Pg 41]the eyes. She will play for her husband. 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. [Pg 42] 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! |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Some leaves hang late, some fall before the first frost—so goes the tale of winter branches and old bones. |
| O my grey hairs! You are truly white as plum blossoms. |
| Subtle, clever brain, wiser than I am, by what devious means do you contrive to remain idle? Teach me, O master. |
| Leaves are greygreen, the glass broken, bright green. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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! |
| 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? |
| 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. |
| 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...! |
| 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 [Pg 64]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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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 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. |
| 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. [Pg 76] 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |