The thought of your scarred legs has been with me on the borderland
of sleep for many nights, also our hours together on the pine
needles. To-night, with the sun falling sadly over the iron mills,
I walked along the Heights and cast an eye down into brilliant
Harlem. The voices of the bargemen, the wheeze of tugs, the low
growl of outpassing vessels, an occasional curse from a freighted
barge, came up with the hum of the city. There seemed to be
some goddess entwined with sea-weed standing over the ocean of
structures. She held a finger to her lips for silence, and pointed
to the Lord knows where--well, where I felt a tumult to go, to
satisfy some hot quest.... I was lost to the multitude of faces
that sent up a passionate and incomprehensible hum ... savour of
youth singing in the veins.
Presently a drizzle drove me back to the room.... I reached up and
flicked out the lights.... In an apartment across the street lives
an old man who always comes to his window at dark and gazes up and
down the streets. His head is grey--his eyes are deep and old. The
light from his shaded reading lamp falls in a pool of dim yellow
about his carpet. Sometimes he turns out the lamp, and leaves the
fire-place alone. Sometimes his head falls forward on his chest,
and he dreams--I suppose, of boundless seas, for he was once a
sea-captain.
His wandering days are over--no more quest. The houses rise to his
eyes like one long, bleak, uncrested wave from the Arctic Sea....
He means old days, but we--we must never grow old; we must live
and ever be full of creation as the cloud is full of lightning. We
must, old pal, ride the deserts, drift over seas; we must spill our
work as we go, as night spills its stars from a casket. Fill me
up with the Pacific in your letters--the big sunlight--the colour
of the mountains where they dip and rise to clouds. I have a dry
palate for it all. Fill me--eye and ear and soul.