1
I like the boy. It’s years back I began to draw him to me—or he was
pushed my way by the others. And what if there’s no sleep because the
bed’s burning; is that a reason to send a chap to Greystone! Greystone!
There’s a name if you’ve any tatter of mind left in you. It’s the long
back, narrowing that way at the waist perhaps whets the chisel in me.
How the flanks flutter and the heart races. Imagination! That’s the worm
in the apple. What if it run to paralyses and blind fires, here’s sense
loose in a world set on foundations. Blame buzzards for the eyes they
have.
* * * * *
_Buzzards, granted their disgusting habit in regard to meat, have eyes of
a power equal to that of the eagles’._
2
Five miscarriages since January is a considerable record Emily dear—but
hearken to me: The Pleiades—that small cluster of lights in the sky
there—. You’d better go on in the house before you catch cold. Go on now!
* * * * *
_Carelessness of heart is a virtue akin to the small lights of the stars.
But it is sad to see virtues in those who have not the gift of the
imagination to value them._
Damn me I feel sorry for them. Yet syphilis is no more than a wild
pink in the rock’s cleft. I know that. Radicals and capitalists doing a
can-can tread the ground clean. Luck to the feet then. Bring a Russian to
put a fringe to the rhythm. What’s the odds? Commiseration cannot solve
calculus. Calculus is a stone. Frost’ll crack it. Till then, there’s
many a good back-road among the clean raked fields of hell where autumn
flowers are blossoming.
_Pathology literally speaking is a flower garden. Syphilis covers the
body with salmon-red petals. The study of medicine is an inverted sort of
horticulture. Over and above all this floats the philosophy of disease
which is a stern dance. One of its most delightful gestures is bringing
flowers to the sick._
3
For a choice? Go to bed at three in the afternoon with your clothes on:
dreams for you! Here’s an old bonnefemme in a pokebonnet staring into the
rear of a locomotive. Or if this prove too difficult take a horse-drag
made of green limbs, a kind of leaf cloth. Up the street with it! Ha,
how the tar clings. Here’s glee for the children. All’s smeared. Green’s
black. Leap like a devil, clap hands and cast around for more. Here’s a
pine wood driven head down into a mud-flat to build a school on. Oh la,
la! sand pipers made mathematicians at the state’s cost.