1
Little round moon up there—wait awhile—do not walk so quickly. I could
sing you a song—: Wine clear the sky is and the stars no bigger than
sparks! Wait for me and next winter we’ll build a fire and shake up
twists of sparks out of it and you shall see yourself in the ashes,
young—as you were one time.
* * * * *
_It has always been the fashion to talk about the moon._
2
This that I have struggled against is the very thing I should have
chosen—but all’s right now. They said I could not put the flower back
into the stem nor win roses upon dead briars and I like a fool believed
them. But all’s right now. Weave away, dead fingers, the darkies are
dancing in Mayaguez—all but one with the sore heel and sugar cane will
soon be high enough to romp through. Haia! leading over the ditches,
with your skirts flying and the devil in the wind back of you—no one
else. Weave away and the bitter tongue of an old woman is eating, eating,
eating venomous words with thirty years mould on them and all shall be
eaten back to honeymoon’s end. Weave and pangs of agony and pangs of
loneliness are beaten backward into the love kiss, weave and kiss recedes
into kiss and kisses into looks and looks into the heart’s dark—and
over again and over again and time’s pushed ahead in spite of all that.
The petals that fell bearing me under are lifted one by one. That which
kissed my flesh for priest’s lace so that I could not touch it—weave
and you have lifted it and I am glimpsing light chinks among the notes!
Backward, and my hair is crisp with purple sap and the last crust’s
broken.
* * * * *
_A woman on the verge of growing old kindles in the mind of her son a
certain curiosity which spinning upon itself catches the woman herself
in its wheel, stripping from her the accumulations of many harsh years
and shows her at last full of an old time suppleness hardly to have been
guessed by the stiffened exterior which had held her fast till that time._
3
Once again the moon in a glassy twilight. The gas jet in the third floor
window is turned low, they have not drawn the shade, sends down a flat
glare upon the lounge’s cotton-Persian cover where the time passes with
clumsy caresses. Never in this _millieu_ has one stirred himself to turn
up the light. It is costly to leave a jet burning at all. Feel your way
to the bed. Drop your clothes on the floor and creep in. Flesh becomes
so accustomed to the touch she will not even waken. And so hours pass
and not a move. The room too falls asleep and the street outside falls
mumbling into a heap of black rags morning’s at seven—
* * * * *
_Seeing a light in an upper window the poet by means of the power he has
enters the room and of what he sees there brews himself a sleep potion._