Last night
I saw these two,
Or two like them,
In the midnight streets.
But before they came
There came an apparition.—
It was a cab, worn, withered, and blighted.
A man like a moth-eaten
Archangel Gabriel
Sat on the box of the crazy thing.
Obviously it had been through Hell;
But its inside was musty and threadbare
As though companies of faded virgins
Had ridden in it for generations.
The horse, as you looked at him from the sidewalk,
Staggered with all four legs;
But to one sitting inside the cab
He must have seemed so thin of beam
As to vanish altogether.
The Archangel Gabriel was inclined to stoutness
And wore a well-preserved Derby hat.
He drove through the night incredulously,
With vague haltings
As if ready to be struck dumb
Should passengers dare
To accept his ciceronage.
Ah, the passengers!
When they rushed
Out of a grilled doorway and across the sidewalk
Their white faces glimmered
As though they would have accepted anything
That could carry them swiftly or slowly
Away from the insupportable
Oppression of Here and Now.
They bundled into the cab,—
Four of them—
Two, whose glass throats were wound with wire and silver
Being destined for destruction
That the other two, with human throats,
Might inherit the _Vita Nuova_.
Then suddenly the Archangel Gabriel,
Leaving the Plaza and steering northwesterly,
Drove his precarious vehicle to the entrance of the Park
And straight down
Into the depths of the sea.
Through watery glooms
And swift gleams as of wave-light,—
Along alleys where vast forests of sea-weed
Aped the summer swaying of terrestrial foliage,
The silent cab moved on,
And the midnight ocean closed around it.
Huge branches of coral
Inky or amber
Lifted themselves in the gloom
Like processional lamp-posts;
And now and then a peering dolphin
Poised questioningly beside the path
Like a policeman.
Now they were gone beyond my sight.
Slowly I followed them;
But the sea retreated before me;
I could not enter the depths of their traversing.
And I walked as in a trance
Pursuing the receding waters
Down the avenues of lamp-posts,
Of foliage, of policemen.
Then, after hours, years, ages,
I saw my quarry returning;
And the sea drew forward with it
In a dark wave and swept over me.
There was the cab,—
And lo! of the two ghostly passengers,
One had become an undulant mermaid
And the other a surging triton—
And they swayed in hollows and foam-heights
Of the shaken water—
Knees, hair, arms
Tossed in confusion—
They were spilled out upon the deep
And the sea-birds shrieked above them.
I think that they went then
To the Sea King’s Palace;
But this is all
That I myself saw.