1
Some fifteen years we’ll say I served this friend, was his valet, nurse,
physician, fool and master: nothing too menial, to say the least. Enough
of that: so.
* * * * *
Stand aside while they pass. This is what they found in the rock when it
was cracked open: this fingernail. Hide your face among the lower leaves,
here’s a meeting should have led to better things but—it is only one
branch out of the forest and night pressing you for an answer! Velvet
night weighing upon your eye-balls with gentle insistence; calling you
away: Come with me, now, tonight! Come with me! now tonight.…
* * * * *
_In great dudgeon over the small profit that has come to him through a
certain companionship a poet addresses himself and the loved one as if it
were two strangers, thus advancing himself to the brink of that discovery
which will reward all his labors but which he as yet only discerns as a
night, a dark void coaxing him whither he has no knowledge._
2
You speak of the enormity of her disease, of her poverty. Bah, these are
the fiddle she makes tunes on and it’s tunes bring the world dancing
to your house-door, even on this swamp side. You speak of the helpless
waiting, waiting till the thing squeeze her windpipe shut. Oh, that’s
best of all, that’s romance—with the devil himself a hero. No my boy. You
speak of her man’s callous stinginess. Yes, my God, how can he refuse
to buy milk when it’s alone milk that she can swallow now? But how is
it she picks market beans for him day in, day out, in the sun, in the
frost? You understand? You speak of so many things, you blame me for my
indifference. Well, this is you see my sister and death, great death is
robbing her of life. It dwarfs most things.
* * * * *
_Filth and vermine though they shock the over-nice are imperfections
of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to
excessive cleanliness. After some years of varied experience with the
bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between
them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other
matters._
3
Hercules is in Hacketstown doing farm labor. Look at his hands if
you’ll not believe me. And what do I care if yellow and red are Spain’s
riches and Spain’s good blood. Here yellow and red mean simply autumn!
The odor of the poor farmer’s fried supper is mixing with the smell
of the hemlocks, mist is in the valley hugging the ground and over
Parsippany—where an oldish man leans talking to a young woman—the moon is
swinging from its star.