AVIATOR

I think of man’s far paths begun in fear

And naked dark beneath a drowsing sea

The warm compassion of whose waves can be

His rest no longer . . . for within this mere

Unworded matter stirs the power to clear

Perverse and sullen elements . . . to free

The magnitude of space . . . the mystery

Of seas beyond the chart of now and here.

The days pass over and the hours share

The magic of a worm’s release . . . as gyre

On rising gyre he circles upward . . . where

The incandescent wings of his desire

Now send him through the dazzling whorls of air

To whirl and flutter at an astral fire.

NEW YORK CITY

What boundless thoughts are his who dares to play

With affirmations of dominion. . . Height

And depth are perilous metaphors,—the might

Of gods,—high gods.—“The man is now,” they say,

“As one of us; he rears his summits gay,—

His unimaginable towers bright

Upon the sheer outposts of dark and light

Where night dims night and day outdazzles day.

We know he means at length to meet the skies;—

To mount on high desires,—and soon or late

To lift his spires to higher pageantries

Where wild geese drive,—indifferent as fate.

Oh, cherubim,—unsheathe your flaming sword

Wherewith you bar the gate-way of the Lord!”

AMATEUR

I love the tread of measured prose that swings

Its ordered legion of words in bright

Accoutrement that gleams against the light,—

And poetry’s aerial course that flings

The star dust scattering from cloudy wings,—

Or lights its fire of faery rhythm to fright

The creeping fears of dust and cold and blight. . .

For words are magical,—words are charmed things.

And if with slow and heavy hand I dare

To make them march or fly or set them free

To burn within that rich and perfumed air

That is their element,—say then of me:

“This English speech of spikenard and of myrrh

She loved,—and much shall be forgiven her.”

BURNING BUSH

A seer in a cloudy place

Once saw the glory of God’s face. . .

And lo, he had a mind to tell

Of a burning bush where God’s word fell!

Today I saw in cloud and flame

A rainbow go the way it came. . .

And a fiery thing

Is the flowering

Japonica in the spring.

OBOE

A TRIOLET

Through this delicate reed

Breathes a pale oread

In a voice that would plead

Through this delicate reed

To all wo and its need

In a tone frail and sad. . .

Through this delicate reed

Breathes a pale oread.

OCTOBER

Silence has fallen on my garden. . .

Autumnal, crystalline,—

October silence. . .

The birds are on their way, now,—their songs are mute. . .

But from the path of their faring,—

And from the very wings of departure

Is shed the clear glory of silence,—

Beauty unrealized in the clamor of summer. . .

Hushed bird songs linger here in the amber of remembrance,—

While all the world seems a rondure of snared music. . .

The sky is a golden gong

Crashing the thin reverberance of silence. . .

Everywhere are stilled rhythms,—sheer harmonies,—

Of pause;—

Of deeper music within music.

Pierce the plenitudes of song—and silence wells beneath. . .

Peer into the deep pools under the shoals of speech

Where pause is the ultimate harmony,—

Soundless unisonance of word, of thought. . .

Silence has fallen on my garden. . .

Silence like new snow

And clear as frosted rime;—

Autumnal, crystalline,—

October.

POEM

A poem is an unicorn;

Of the delicate air

It is born

To dare

The jeopardy of breath;—

The jaguars of love and of death.

Its evasive feet

Tune their part

To the beat

Of your heart.

It drinks of the nectar of nenuphars

Under the stars. . .

When honeyed manna it is fed,—

Smooth anodynes and charms,—

You dare to stroke its timorous head

And soothe its shy alarms.

TO MARCO,—MY DOG

Dear dark one,

You were my shadow on bright days

Of sun. . .

In sunlit ways.

But on black nights it seemed your aim

To touch the springs of darkness whence you came,—

Deeper than night’s own shadow.

Then I could only see

The tips of your white feet guiding me

To your busy commerce with the things of night,—

The incommunicable, secret night

You loved; and when I loosed you in the park

In the deepest dark,—

Unled,—

I followed where your white feet sped,—

Four, vagrant, twinkling points of light. . .

You go a long way . . . and unleashed . . . tonight. . .

Far, far beyond my sight. . .

Back to your dark,—my shadow. . . Oh, it would hearten me,

When I shall travel on the path you tread,

To see

Your little white feet speeding on ahead!

TIME IN THE MUSEUM

The echoes ring their silver hooves tonight

As charioted Aminóphis rides

Along the streets of Karnak. . . and his bride’s

Scant draperies flow backward,—as the bright

Emblazoned trumpets of old Egypt fight

In mute reverberation with the tides

Of past and future . . . and the present glides

In unperceived,—inexorable flight. . .

A gift of lapis lazuli awaits

The young queen’s pleasure at the palace gates

Where Nefertiti tries her bracelet on

From Bourrabura,—King of Babylon. . .

No sun nor moon would mar a rondure thus

Refigured on a gold sarcophagus.

DESERT BY TRAIN

By the train side

Glide

The grey busses over the Great Divide. . .

And the huge solitudes

Somehow relate

Themselves to the preposterous

Bus. . .

To the state

Of fret and strife. . .

To the stress

Of the incalculably small

Stretch of loneliness

We call

Human life.

Across the swales

Of sage. . .

Over the shard and the shales

Of cosmic mountainous trails

Without effrontery or fuss

Sidles the little bus

Rising to express a mood

Not clearly understood,—

A guess,—

Indicative

I am. . . I live. . .

Far better it understands

The slow,

Straight, categorical demands

Of Go!

Of how to glide

By the train side. . .

Through the sieve

Of Time to climb

With the tenuous imperative

Of human breath. . .

That flirts

The outskirts

Of the valley of death.

THE FIRST SWALLOW

To read your dazzling cypher,—I should know

The antique scrolls,—vermilion, gold and blue

Encrusted manuscripts,—and should construe

Their ancient text and lettering. . . Although

The Word is not made blossom in the low

Unbudded pear tree,—there is spread for you

The open page of heaven,—to set thereto

Your signature in evening’s afterglow.

Upon the cloudy parchment of the skies

You curve your verses in a running screed

Of unknown script and gilded heraldries.

Oh, some day,—surely,—I shall learn to read

Your darting phrase,—that whirls its length in bars

Of arabesque,—picked out with evening stars!

LEAF MUSIC

At daybreak, the trees

Share the tide’s mystery;

And the tremors that seize

At daybreak,—the trees,—

Are like thin symphonies

Of the shells of the sea.

At daybreak, the trees

Share the tide’s mystery.

QUESTION

What is life?

Life is desire.

What is death?

Look at the old women,—

Desireless,—dessicated.

Air may be pumped with a bellows.

Breath?

Of what avail are a few more mouthfuls,—

Death?

SHAKESPEARE SPOKEN

We walk in radiant, enchanted ways,—

A labyrinth of wonder words,—more rare

Than planetary path, moon trail or haze

Of milky sky-swath. . . Now we grow aware

Of timeless things,—of deathless; there appears

A long, dim, lovely vista,—as today

Calls yesterday,—and fugitive, far years

Swim in the air like birds, about our way.

Last night,—was it,—Elizabeth, the Queen

Heard first these wreathen words? Tonight, the stir

My heart makes,—links this hour with what has been,—

As pearl with matching pearl. . . The fretful whir

Of time is muted,—as we move among

The enchanted mazes of the English tongue.

COLOR CONFLICT

My neighbor has a black cat. . .

I confess

I distrust

Lithe loveliness;—

I must.

My neighbor has a black cat;—

Treachery thereat!

Incandescent eyes,—

Globes of amber sorceries

Inset

With jet.

My neighbor has a black cat

I have red birds!

Last summer’s nestlings

With crimson wings

Lovelier than words. . .

I offer security

Window high

But I can give no warnings

These snowy mornings

Though my heart cries

Beware of amber eyes

And be not so

Radiant . . . so blood red upon the snow!

MEMORY

I need a word,—a star sapphire,—to be

Inset with the fretted gold-work of a phrase.

I do not find it in the damascene trays

Wherein I keep the pearl and filagree;—

And neither does it lie within the three

Carved ivory caskets,—where in locked relays

Are spread the jasper and the chrysoprase,

The topaz, beryl and chalcedony.

At length I send my courier, who has played

With time and space,—and knows where glow the bright

Sapphires like stars through lovers’ tears,—when night

Meets day above Verona’s balustrade.

And suddenly . . . within my phrase is set

A star that might have shone on Juliet.

CHILD WITH BOOK

His thoughts are birds,—unloosed for sea and air

And earth tonight;—he feels their swift release

From narrow words of “now” and “here” to these

Free sentences of lordly ones who wear

The kingly robes of miniver and vair,—

And in their worded turrets turn the keys

That lock the levels of the lunar seas

And loose the secrets crested thoughts may share.

He learns the lay of hidden gardens by

Their lurk of cinnamon and bergamot

Near Persian palaces,—uncareful what

His course is toward in wayward vagrancy

That follows the roc’s cry to the towering cliffs

Where echo the hoof-beats of the hippogriffs.

CALL OF THE WILD GEESE

Remember

When October shies

Into November

I am on the track

Of the roving pack

Of the skies.

Out beyond the barrier

Of time’s preserve,—

Out beyond the misty blur

Of the planet’s curve,—

On their royal flight

At the spangled hem

Of some bright

October night

I shall follow them. . . !

Remember. . .

When October shies

Into November

I am on the track

Of the roving pack

Of the skies!

POEMS

In Italy,—like shells upon the shore

The poems lie,—uncut,—unsorted,—for

The questing hand of any passer-by

To gather and to chase exquisitely

Some precious outline,—graven to the worth

Of shell or stone,—where even the ancient earth

Is steeped in myth and lore and poetry

Down fathoms deep as the Tyrrhenian sea.

And I have searched as children do the wells

Of sand and shoal to find the dripping shells

Of poem stuff,—and secretly bestow

Thereon some treasured word,—intaglio,—

Where nacred tints of milk and honey mix

In cameo and two-fold sardonyx.

BOOK WORM

The library is old across the way. . .

And my five years are few to enter where

Doors close and windows sift the light and day

Is muted and the world grows pent and grey

And words said, thin to whispers unaware,—

And kind, old, pungent odors,—here and there,—

Creep out to meet me,—sandalwood and bay,—

Like breath of olden thoughts upon the air.

I gnaw the bone of quiet;—on the wall

Is spread a blur of books,—their taint in all

The corners and on every shelf and chair

A lovely savor ancient leathers wear,—

And I,—in after hours,—have found that scent

More gracious than the oils of Orient.

TO ELIZABETH

A queen

Should be more wonderful than a king.

She should bring

All the beauty that has been.

She should seem

All the loveliness of the spring,—

All the radiance that a king

Could dream.

THE PRIZE

Oh, life is a fair merchandise. . .

A doubloon for each freighted breath,—

An aureate cargo,—under azure skies,—

Trailed by the black prowed brigantine of death.

BABEL

As long ago as misty Genesis

They dared to dream of towers to touch the sky. . .

Some great Assyrian star swung heavily

Above the velvet sward of night,—and this,—

A climbing thought reached after; blasphemies

Were whispered,—and dreams soared in secrecy

Toward stars in gardens,—and such high thoughts by

Their thrust were tinged with perpetuities.

Yet Babylonia is less than breath

Of words forgotten,—and its spires-to-be

Made short and hasty covenant with death,—

Shut in the plain of Shinar from the sea.

I sometimes dream of those untenable towers. . .

As lovely and as insolent as ours.

MIGRATORY BIRDS

You come to me

So confidently

I like to think

It is not alone

For the grain and drink

On the smooth stone

But that a kindred drift

We own. . .

For I long. . . I long

For the lift

Of song. . .

And the wings of my heart ache too

For the winds of the coastal blue!

WISH FULFILLMENT

San Francisco. 1906.

“For in one hour so great riches is come

to naught.”

I coveted the gems of Asia,—strand

On supple strand,—that evening,—in the great

Thronged port of merchandise,—the open gate

To orient treasuries,—where sea and land

Re-word desire in jade or amber . . . and

I would have bartered a round year for spate

Of ivory and pearl and crusted plate

And purple silk and scarlet saraband.

Then hell flung high the loot of seven seas

To the beleaguered stars. . . An old Chinese

In charred, brocaded priest gear,—owed me his

Frail breath . . . and pressed on my reluctance this

Rare temple jade . . . repayment he thought not

A sacrilege toward gods that clean forgot.

TEN TO ONE

We know less of mathematics

Than a cat knows of aquatics

Yet I reckon,—little Fido,—

You should live as long as I do.

If your year counts ten of mine

Unmathematically align

Your little stretch with my design

With zero east of the digit line.

There should be some way to do it,—

Some trick,—if we only knew it. . .

Surely there’s a sly equation,—

A subtraction,—a summation,—

Syncope or syncopation,—

Solar time or magnitude

That would adjust the dual feud

Of tempo that disturbs the measure

Of our little round of pleasure.

That your year counts ten of mine

Is surely nothing but a fine

Impertinence of figurers

To lengthen mine and shorten yours. . .

Throw adage, axiom, apothem

Into the dust bin,—all of them!

If your year counts ten of mine

I’ll whistle you over the other nine.

You jump so nimbly, little pet,—

Perhaps we’ll score the mark we’ve set.

If we should put our sapience to it. . .

I think it’s ten to one we’d do it.

SUN DIAL ANTIPHONY

My dial is a lovely thing;

It stands serenely summoning

The shy, swift messengers, awing. . .

Its story is of hours that pass,—

Not counted off with boom and brass

But sun encircled on the grass.

It stands enswathed in velvet mist,—

By the first flush of sunrise kissed

With topaz, rose and amethyst.

I know a call the redbirds know,—

A ritual of morning,—slow,

Antiphonal,—tossed to and fro

Between us,—with a manifold

Sweet, secret meaning,—told and told,—

As dear as friendship,—and as old.

Upon the weather-beaten face

Of the old dial, now I place

A votive bowl of seed,—a grace

Of faith. Soon on the dial rests

A fire of wings,—a flame of crests,—

Of coral beaks, of ruby breasts.

And so they go the way they came,—

I know their tongue,—I speak their name,—

The dial glows,—an altar flame.

My dial is a lovely thing,

It stands serenely summoning

The shy, swift messengers awing.

AWAKENING

1940

Two oceans cradle us in guarded ease,—

And from this soothing premise, inference runs

In ways illogical. . . The tragic suns

Of undefended lands may set,—but these

Have not our oceans to defend their peace.

Not with my ears,—oh, no,—mere hearing shuns

The blow,—it is my heart that hears the guns

Boom heavily, today, across the retreating seas.

LOVE’S PARADOX

They tell us love is briefer than the span

Of day or night in swift totality. . .

They say it is enduring as the sky,—

An ache, an ease, an irk,—since time began;—

A bauble tawdry as a tinsel fan,—

A gift no god has scorned,—in earth or high

Elysium;—a grace, a guile,—to try

The tongue of Ormazd or of Ahriman.

I think that love is like a wild sea bird

Blown in, by storm, against your breast. . . Absurd

To call it yours . . . yet on its talon, band

A thong of pity,—that on sea or land

Or mistiest port of heaven,—it may live

A lightly bound, far roving fugitive.

THE ROOST

My little poems never stray,—

I caution them to mind

The portly giants in the way—

And bide where folk are kind. . .

Anonymous to peck and tear

At homely crust,—because

I know a cold, appraising stare

Would chill their little craws.

I see them as I wish they were!

We shun the roaring fuss

Of ogre and of editor

The contumelious.

WATER COLOR

If wishes were fishes,

Oh my, oh me!

Reedily, weedily

I’d carve a deep pool of the green porphyry

By the green sea,—

If wishes were fishes, oh me!

If words were birds

Oh me, oh my!

Wittily, prettily

I’d fly them as high as the bowl of the sky,—

The blue, blue bowl of Italy,—

If words were birds, oh my!

For words and wishes like birds and fishes,

Oh me, oh my!

Adventure the high

Shining cavern of sky

And the vasty dim valleys of sea,—

And cloud foam is their home

And the spume of sea fume,—

And both deeps are their keeps.

FELIX

Grandfather’s bookplate: “Felix qui potuit

Rerum cognoscere causas”! Some show to it!

Virgil once said it,—and stout things I owe to it,—

Big things ever to be!

Grandfather’s bookplate,—I, a child,—saw to it

“Felix” was always there,—Felix was law to it,—

Puckish and quizzical chuckles to draw to it,—

Jolly and pat and free.

Who guessed the store to it,—Latin or lore to it?

Reading grew magical while Felix bore to it

Every incentive to add more and more to it. . .

Pangloss and Shandy and Peregrine score to it,—

Melancholy Anatomy!

Who was to question or quibble a flaw to it?

Felix and I always sat cheek by jaw to it,—

Felix was there as my guide and he saw to it

Words were their starriest,—thoughts wore their wings.

Who gave a hang that I came rash and raw to it?

Nothing was taboo and nothing was awe to it. . .

Mine was the merriment,—his was the law to it,—

Felix took care of the causes of things.

TO C. B.

We talked of many things one talks of till

The dawn . . . of beauty . . . of the mysteries

Of spring . . . of thesis and antithesis

In Hegel’s metaphysic . . . and the chill

Of early morning found us eagerly still

Abuilding bridges over the abyss

Unknowable with nothing more than this

Slight rope of symbol and of human will.

Dawn glowed like hieratic jade. . . No chime

Of hours quivered on the April air,—

No comet fell nor sudden wing flashed where

In our accountancy impassive time

Delayed his cold summation . . . and where mild

And violet eyed,—space looked on us and smiled.

CHERRY TREE

Philosophers say we cannot see

A thing in itself . . . a tree as a tree,—

But only as it appears to be

In time and space and in causality.

Last April burst with billowing stress

My cherry tree’s frail loveliness. . .

And May’s scarlet fruited bearing

Overbent and spent her wearing.

Thereafter, the small cherry tree

Dropped her leaves and ceased to be.

Only essential branch and bough

Become her delicate symbol now. . .

And no more will her feathered rim

Lie spread like wings of the cherubim. . .

And finished forever are the fire

And flaming sword of her desire.

Today,—a day of snow encrusted boughs,—

I see

Beneath the window of my house

In bloom of star and fire and ice

A tree

Of paradise. . .

And as I look,—appear

From far and near

Red birds like living flame

Where once the radiant fruit came.

Red birds that burst like burning words

From tense

Boughs of icy reticence. . .

This is no more a tree

It is a metaphor

A sign

Of a divine

Metonymy.

PARABLE

Men say that in the season of long drouth

And parching winds and brooks run rubble dry

The roots of things go deeper,—till they lie

Assuaged in soundless waters,—where the mouth

Of some unfailing spring abounds. . . The wise

Forecast the next year rich with weighted bloom

Of ever richer blossoming . . . the plume

Of wild grape like a breath of paradise.

And so in arid days when hope seems dearth

Of showers and appeasing dews,—I shall

Reach only deeper,—in that interval,—

To where,—in depths immeasurable to earth,—

My spirit roots may find the hidden springs

That draw their sustenance from eternal things.

JUSTICE

I would not be a hawk

Predatory,—death dealing,—

Though they gave me a regal crown of rapacity.

I would not be a judge

Tenacious fingered,—icily immobile,—

Sentencing grimly,—with cold lips,—

Though I wore robes of samite and of law.

I would not be a hawk

Agate eyed, fire taloned,—

Basilisk beaked and beautiful

As Lucifer,—

Enjoying bitter enchantments of death.

I looked once deep into the eyes of a hawk

Blazing wild,—

Shut hapless behind bars. . . .

I opened them. He fled. . .

Indissolubly one

With the element that evoked him.

His crest of adamant and gold

Hurtled forth headlong

In great circles of ferocity.

I heard the searing scream of a sparrow

As the glutted talons were fattened,—rejoiced. . .

And the bronze curve of doom

Darkened the blue abeyances

Of evening.

Once I looked into the heart of a judge,—

Freezing cold. . .

“Law is my living”,—reasoned the judge,—

“Death decrees are the talons of justice,—

The beak and the claws. . .”

I would not be a judge

Dropping death from infrangible lips of ice.

I would not be a hawk

Smiting like a shadow scimitar,—

Denying the bright ambience

Of love.

DEATH

“Rejoice not against me”

For years a many,—for years on end,—

Misliked and shunned was he. . .

But now that he comes as a friend to a friend,—

I know him mine enemy.

SUMMER TIME

Grant a nimble foot to dance in the wind,—

A burnished eye to shine,—

Give a draught of the breath of a climbing rose

Or the bloom of the wild grape vine,—

Yield a radiant tang of strawberries. . .

Fling a liquid flame,—as when

A day star falls,—or the cardinal calls

And calls and calls again.

FAMILY PORTRAIT

A gentleman from Virginia,—with a streak

Of high adventure,—and an eye for more

And richer fields,—uncoveted before

He countered death on meadow land and creek

And wrested a fair acreage from beak

And claw and Indian tether,—where his floor

He laid him solid,—with a wide hearth core

And shaped his roof into a gallant peak.

And here he lived in suave urbanity

With children, friends and slaves;—the portrait caught

The peace and amplitude that ruled his thought

In quieter years,—with sun and grass and tree.

The house he built is ashes.—Nothing now

Is left him but my casual lips and brow.

ANGLO SAXON

And shall I not remember well the sweet

Fairspoken word my mother fed me on?

What lovelier stars,—what darker,—I’ve foregone

For the goodly taste of English speech! Albeit

I travel alien paths,—no counterfeit

Will serve me for that word of hers,—oh, none!

Upon my lips the savor lies . . . her son

Goes hungering and unashamed of it.

Far stars may fling their verse on frieze or plinth,—

Or whisper me prose as singing as a shell,—

Where,—stained with amaranth and hyacinth,—

Their wantless poets walk in asphodel;

But I,—wherever I go,—on foot or wing,—

Shall go,—as I go now,—remembering. . .

CHILDHOOD

“And the evening and the morning were the

sixth day.”

And God has given me dominion . . . word

Of power over all the green, sweet earth,—

And over every creeping thing and bird,—

Swift fish and lagging cattle;—from the girth

Of netted fireflies to the thundering

Of galaxies that whirl in purple space,—

Star dust and lovely dawns,—the shining face

Of the first golden crocus in the spring. . .

And through wide branches,—I may learn where far

Aldebaran and mighty Sirius are. . .

And gather the scent of gardens,—where I lie. . .

While God is lighting up the evening sky. . .

And, with His word,—above the lunar seas

The lovelier gardens of the Pleiades.

RETURN

Last night, while trade winds roared and foghorns plied

Their monotone . . . my dreams were willfully

With one who loved the eager seas,—storm free,

Or savage with the hunger of the tide. . .

With one,—who, on the ebb of April, died. . .

Land locked. . . I dreamed he climbed grey cliffs with me

Above a lashing waste of turbulent sea

Wind-hurled in spray about us far and wide. . .

His eyes held laughing fires. . . “An inland fear

Crept on me, unaware . . .” he said. . . “How far

The tide calls . . . and tonight I come . . . to hear

The trade winds battle at the outer bar. . .

The crash . . . the hush. . . I’ve dreamed of this . . .” he said.

“Your surf tonight would almost wake the dead!”

WHITE MAGIC

Upon a Tuscan day of festival

I paused a moment where the ancient road

Sweeps round a heady curve of hill thick snowed

With white Carrara dust. . . In pastoral

And flower wreathed processional

Came toward me two white oxen,—and time slowed

Its tread and claimed the primal gods were owed

Those agate eyes and horns of ritual.

On hooves of porphyry they came;—no gull

Had feather softer than their flanks,—white furred

With legend;—and the lidded centuries stirred

In sleep;—for ancient names and beautiful:

Etruria, Alba, Sybaris distill

Archaic wonder on a Tuscan hill.

COMEDY

I go to the pictures to see them twice;—

Once upon the moving screen

And again upon the screen of the crowd face.

I walk down the aisle to watch the picture reflected

Upon the crowd face.

I see smiles ripple in widening rhythms,—

Elfin, goblin rhythms,—

From the stone of merriment

Dropped into neutral waters.

The crowd face is pitiful in its smiling.

It is being slaked here at the fountain of smiles.

I watch an ever widening ripple of laughter

Run in antic circles over its face.

I pity its face

Here is assuagement for the gravity of human woe.

Here men come to drink of the fountain of smiles. . .

To be appeased with the soothing balm of laughter. . .

To release the bounded ego

To the unbounded cosmos

That knows no hap and no hindrance. . .

That spawns laughter,—untroubled laughter. . .

I watch the waves of merriment widen, flicker, recede

As the mind travels on some frail inconsequence

And faces are rippled with pitiful laughter

And eyes shine with the deliverance of dream.

RADIO

Ten cycles of the ecliptic sped by ten

Are gone since Homer wandered on the high

Green slope of Helicon . . . and shepherds by

The star pied seas of Hellas heard again

The ancient songs,—the rare old songs . . . as when

The heroes of the mountain top and sky

In immemorial cadence . . . gloriously

Gave to the winds the praise of gods and men.

And now,—in these far centuries,—I near

The secret of the tides of song,—and share

The murmur of their bardic springs . . . and on

Some sudden muted interval,—in clear

And planetary rhythms of the air

I hear the running brooks of Helicon.

MISS BLYNN

Today I rip the stitches in a satin gown

That has lain in the garret,—forgot,—folded down. . .

Old laces must be cherished,—they outlive joys,—long years.

They outlive tears.

Little Miss Blynn,—who stitched this lace in place,—

Has been ten years under ground;

But her stitches hold,—steel bound.

As I rip them this day of winter and deep snow

I seem to see Miss Blynn as she stitched them in,—

Ten winters ago.

Her face was faintly lined,—but her neck still wore

A rondure and grace

Though she had stitched for forty years or more. . .

And she was slow as the hour hand of eternity,—I thought,—

Watching her: “Time and money wasted!

Caught

And pierced by her suspended needle,—basted

In her unhurrying, deliberate thread!” Out and in!

Stitch on stitch! Little Miss Blynn

Seemed inexorable as her stitches were. . .

And now,—as I take out each contumacious little thread,—

I seem to read it plain as word said,—

Clear as sound,—

Though she is dead,—ten years,—under ground:

“Scissors and thread!

Fate,—they call it! Fate!

Never a chance! Early and late

I’ve stitched . . . straight . . . straight. . .

Only in dreams

I’ve known

The raptures of

Love. . .

While I have sewn

Your seams . . . seams . . . seams. . .

My breath shortens with counting

The mounting sum of them! . . Now love is starving to death.”

Stitches in a satin gown . . . folded down. . .

Old laces must be cherished . . . they outlive lives . . . long years.

They outlive tears.

Little Miss Blynn,

Your time,—your time is nearly stitched in!

At the end of it all

Hereabout

Is a small,

Tight knot.

I have got to rip the fabric to get that out.

INLAND VOICES

Within this sea of blue grass lie the beat

Of tides,—the tune of surf,—the luminous haze

Of mewing gulls;—I hear on quiet days

The secret voices of the waves that meet

The wordage of warm sand,—as crisp and sweet

As chosen verse that chants the fugitive ways

A trade wind takes on deep sea paths,—and lays

The purring breath of shell beneath my feet.

The tides of ocean,—long before my birth,—

Moved on this meadow,—and the measureless sand

Lay on these leagues of blue grass pasture land

Where ages hence,—when spring tides wake the earth. . .

Some unremembered word of mine may sing

Rewhispered in a shell’s frail whispering.

CHILD OF GOD

Deep snow . . . and twilight deepening . . . yet I should

Have known him, surely,—even had the gull

Not hovered near,—wing curved and beautiful,—

In swerving arcs above him,—where he stood

With lantern and with staff,—and knocked. . . His breast

Was girt with no insignia of gold

Yet as he turned against the bitter cold

I think I might have known. . . I might have guessed.

For peradventure even holden eyes

May open and may know him standing there. . .

The bloom on him of stars from kindlier skies,—

The mood of tenderer winds about his hair. . .

It was my humble gardener at the door

Where he had stood a hundred times before.

MICROCOSM

1940

They say

Thousands were killed in one short day. . .

Thousands and thousands . . . on the air

Come words of bleak despair.

And these are only words to me. . . .

For such things cannot be.

But when,—as now,—they send

A token of one smiling boy

“Shot down” . . . at last . . . I comprehend

In single count . . . the casual end

Of youth and joy.

I share in cost

The piteous few

Lost

Years. . .

As though of all despair

The measure were

Concentred in this integer. . .

As a drop of dew

Holds for your eyes

The clouded skies

And enspheres

All tears.

FRATERNITÉ

I walked with one who said our score was paid

And over-paid upon the battlefield

Of the Argonne. . . We saw the fertile yield

Of berries,—dark and red,—no tilth of spade

Had touched where young blood poured beneath the shade

Of Belleau Wood . . . and small white stones had sealed

The legend of libation there,—a shield

On alien altars we had rashly laid.

He spoke . . . yet I remembered how you came

From out the courtly ways of Chavagnac

To fight on wild frontiers and in the track

Of foaming wildernesses,—for a name,—

A shining word,—a shibboleth that set

Your torch to ours,—your heart,—young LaFayette!

WILD GEESE

A whisper is upon the wind tonight,—

The whirring, gusty whispering of wings. . .

The muffled surge of murmuring armies brings

To emulous tumult the far paths of flight.

Upon what secret order is the might

Of lunar armies loosed and sped,—what things

Unknowable,—these cosmic journeyings

Above the pale of thought,—the arc of sight?

And do they pass, in vague processional,

Vast other armies also under stress

Of marching order,—whose dim voices fall

Upon my shuttered door of consciousness?

And are these wild geese flying overhead

Or hurrying legions of the newly dead?

ARTIST

They said he hunted fireflies

High up in the sidereal skies. . .

They whispered . . . only nebulæ

His net of dream would hold . . . that he

Was not sky wise . . . and furthermore

His filament of fancy bore

No bait to snare a meteor.

They railed: “Old Fireflies!” He went

His own high way intransigent;

For he had learned in far off land

To hold his heart in his naked hand;

Dark lore he learned,—by scroll and chart:

“There’s no bait like a beating heart.”

He went his way,—for bliss or ban,—

His sky way antinomian;

For well he knew,—come fire, come flood,—

The net was baited with his blood.

They said he netted fireflies,—

The trivia of the stellar skies;—

But hurtling from the fields afar,—

From where the dizziest sky trails are,—

There blazed, one night, a shooting star. . .

All thereabout it raged, and rent

The skies,—and roared incontinent. . .

Upon the net it swept, unspent.

It whined,—it sniffed,—it eat,—they heard,—

It licked the hunter’s hand,—it purred.

IN A LIBRARY

Here thoughts exale their qualities,—as fair

Old perfumes live,—or sacred unguents are

Preserved within a mortuary jar

Whose lid I open tenderly to the bare

Astringence of the outer, living air

While Pliny tells of terraces where far

Cool breezes of the Apennines re-star

His villa with these violets I share.

I breathe the odors of the hours that were

And know the unwasted joy of ancient things;

The rhetoric of Abelard,—the blur

Of love words long forgotten,—and the strings

Of scented cargoes on the waves that stir

The ships of Tarshish and of Nineveh.

KENTUCKIAN

I dream the old trees live again . . . their scars

Made whole . . . and while the ancient summers spread

Their leaves,—like words interminably said,—

The forest murmurs at my window bars. . .

The immemorial wilderness that wars

No more with man,—where young grandfather led

The trail his searching ax interpreted,—

And built his cabin open to the stars.

On many a winter midnight hushed in snow

Come footsteps round our fires and doors shut blind,—

As over the drowsing quiet of the mind

Move soundless moccasins that come and go

On lonely trails a lean young woodsman knows

Through forests bending with forgotten snows.