1
Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is pennyroyal if one knows to
use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little
further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring
mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
2
For what it’s worth: Jacob Louslinger, white haired, stinking, dirty
bearded, cross eyed, stammer tongued, broken voiced, bent backed, ball
kneed, cave bellied, mucous faced—deathling,—found lying in the weeds “up
there by the cemetery”. “Looks to me as if he’d been bumming around the
meadows for a couple of weeks”. Shoes twisted into incredible lilies: out
at the toes, heels, tops, sides, soles. Meadow flower! ha, mallow! at
last I have you. (Rot dead marigolds—an acre at a time! Gold, are you?)
Ha, clouds will touch world’s edge and the great pink mallow stand singly
in the wet, topping reeds and—a closet full of clothes and good shoes
and my-thirty-year’s-master’s-daughter’s two cows for me to care for and
a winter room with a fire in it—. I would rather feed pigs in Moonachie
and chew calamus root and break crab’s claws at an open fire: age’s lust
loose!
3
Talk as you will, say: “No woman wants to bother with children in this
country”;—speak of your Amsterdam and the whitest aprons and brightest
doorknobs in Christendom. And I’ll answer you: “Gleaming doorknobs
and scrubbed entries have heard the songs of the housemaids at sun-up
and—housemaids are wishes. Whose? Ha! the dark canals are whistling,
whistling for who will cross to the other side. If I remain with hands in
pocket leaning upon my lamppost—why—I bring curses to a hag’s lips and
her daughter on her arm knows better than I can tell you—best to blush
and out with it than back beaten after.
* * * * *
_In Holland at daybreak, of a fine spring morning, one sees the
housemaids beating rugs before the small houses of such a city as
Amsterdam, sweeping, scrubbing the low entry steps and polishing
doorbells and doorknobs. By night perhaps there will be an old woman with
a girl on her arm, histing and whistling across a deserted canal to some
late loiterer trudging aimlessly on beneath the gas lamps._