Swift, Swift go my days.
By rights I think time should drag with me, for I am wasting my
portion of life as I live it.
But my days pass Swift--Swift, Swift.
They come, they fly away--before I know.
I’m thinking it is Tuesday: but while I’m thinking--Wednesday has
come: and gone: and Thursday is rushing in. Tuesday, blue-and-gold or
gray-and-silver, with its mornings and nights and bits of food and
openings of doors and thinkings: Wednesday with the same equipment:
Thursday the same.
Each day comes and goes like a flash of filmed silvered garbled light.
But there is time in each for me to touch the enchanted Everydayness:
time for the turbulent sly delight of tasting, smelling, feeling the
eternal humors and romances in each small thing near me--my Clock, my
Window, my Jar of Cold Cream, my Two Thumbs. There is time in each
day for it to make me pay a wearing glimmering feverish homage to the
mystic daily godhead.
My life exacts terrific homages from me.
I am wearing out--frailly, tiredly, from a desolate uneasy love of
living.
It is why my days go Swift when by rights time should drag leadenly
in punishment for barbarous futileness.
There is not time-space enough in any of the days sufficient to love
the virile green and the murderous red and the sweet pale surprising
purple in the sunset above the west desert: nor space to love the
smell of a sudden August rain: nor the flaming delicate Idea of the
poet John Keats.
While I’m starting to love each of those to its height of
love-worthiness--the to-day is gone: and the to-morrow, which must
see a new love-game started for each Thing, is come.
But while I say ‘is come’: it’s gone.
So Swift go my days--oh Swift, Swift!
_By the blood of dead Americans_