1
’N! cha! cha! cha! destiny needs men, so make up your mind. Here’s an oak
filling the wind’s space. Out with him!
By carefully prepared stages come down through the vulgarities of a
cupiscent girlhood to the barren distinction of this cold six A. M. Her
pretty, pinched face is a very simple tune but it carries now a certain
quasi-maidenly distinction. It’s not at least what you’d have heard six
years back when she was really virgin.
* * * * *
_Often when the descent seems well marked there will be a subtle
ascent over-ruling it so that in the end when the degradation is fully
anticipated the person will be found to have emerged upon a hilltop._
2
Such an old sinner knows the lit-edged clouds. No spring days like those
that come in October. Strindberg had the eyes for Swan White! So make my
bed with yours, tomorrow…? Tomorrow … the hospital.
* * * * *
_Seeing his life at an end a miserable fellow, much accustomed to evil,
wishes for the companionship of youth and beauty before he dies and in
exchange thinks to proffer that praise which due to the kind of life he
has led he is most able to give._
3
Here’s a new sort of April clouds: whiffs of dry snow on the polished
roadway that, curled by the wind, lie in feathery figures. Oh but April’s
not to be hedged that simply. She was a Scotch lady and made her own
butter and they grew their own rye. It was the finest bread I ever
tasted. And how we used to jump in the hay! When he lost his money she
kept a boarding house.… But this is nothing to the story that should have
been written could he have had time to jot it all down: of how Bertha’s
lips are turned and her calf also and how she weighs 118 pounds. Do I
think that is much? Hagh! And her other perfections. Ruin the girl? Oh
there are fifty niceties that—being virtuous, oh glacially virtuous—one
might consider, i.e. whose touch is the less venomous and by virtue of
what sanction? Love, my good friends has never held sway in more than a
heart or two here and there since—? All beauty stands upon the edge of
the deflowering. I confess I wish my wife younger. This is the lewdest
thought possible: it makes mockery of the spirit, say you? Solitary
poet who speaks his mind and has not one fellow in a virtuous world! I
wish for youth! I wish for love—! I see well what passes in the street
and much that passes in the mind. You’ll say this has nothing in it of
chastity. Ah well, chastity is a lily of the valley that only a fool
would mock. There is no whiter nor no sweeter flower—but once past, the
rankest stink comes from the soothest petals. Heigh-ya! A crib from our
mediæval friend Shakespeare.
* * * * *
_That which is heard from the lips of those to whom we are talking in
our day’s-affairs mingles with what we see in the streets and everywhere
about us as it mingles also with our imaginations. By this chemistry is
fabricated a language of the day which shifts and reveals its meaning as
clouds shift and turn in the sky and sometimes send down rain or snow
or hail. This is the language to which few ears are tuned so that it
is said by poets that few men are ever in their full senses since they
have no way to use their imaginations. Thus to say that a man has no
imagination is to say nearly that he is blind or deaf. But of old poets
would translate this hidden language into a kind of replica of the speech
of the world with certain distinctions of rhyme and meter to show that it
was not really that speech. Nowadays the elements of that language are
set down as heard and the imagination of the listener and of the poet are
left free to mingle in the dance._