Poems by Robinson Jeffers

Poems

• A Little Scraping Read Poem Log in to favourite

  True, the time, to one who does not love farce,
  And if misery must be prefers it nobler, shows apparent vices;
  At least it provides the cure for ambition.
  
  One does not crave power in ant-hills, nor praise in a paper forest;
  One must not even indulge the severe
  Romance of separateness, as of Milton grown blind and old
  In his broken temple against the drunkards:
  The ants are good creatures, there is nothing to be heroic about.
  
  But the time is not a strong prison either.
  
  A little scraping the walls of dishonest contractor's concrete
  Through a shower of chips and sand makes freedom.
  
  Shake the dust from your hair.
  
  This mountain sea-coast is real,
  For it reaches out far into past and future;
  It is part of the great and timeless excellence of things.
  
  A few
  Lean cows drift high up the bronze hill;
  The heavy-necked plow-team furrows the foreland, gulls tread the furrow;
  Time ebbs and flows but the rock remains.
  
  Two riders of tired horses canter on the cloudy ridge;
  Topaz-eyed hawks have the white air;
  Or a woman with jade-pale eyes, hiding a knife in her hand,
  Goes through cold rain over gray grass.
  
  God is here, too, secretly smiling, the beautiful power
  That piles up cities for the poem of their fall
  And gathers multitude like game to be hunted when the season comes.

• A Redeemer Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The road had steepened and the sun sharpened on the high
  ridges; the stream probably was dry,
  Certainly not to be come to down the pit of the canyon.
  
  We
  stopped for water at the one farm
  In all that mountain.
  
  The trough was cracked with drought, the
  moss on the boards dead, but an old dog
  Rose like a wooden toy at the house-door silently.
  
  I said "There
  will be water somewhere about,"
  And when I knocked a man showed us a spring of water.
  
  Though
  his hair was nearly white I judged him
  Forty years old at most.
  
  His eyes and voice were muted.
  
  It is
  likely he kept his hands hidden,
  I failed to see them until we had dipped the spring.
  
  He stood then
  on the lip of the great slope
  And looked westward over an incredible country to the far hills
  that dammed the sea-fog: it billowed
  Above them, cascaded over them, it never crossed them, gray
  standing flood.
  
  He stood gazing, his hands
  Were clasped behind him; I caught a glimpse of serous red under
  the fingers, and looking sharply
  When they drew apart saw that both hands were wounded.
  
  I said
  "Your hands are hurt.
  
  " He twitched them from sight,
  But after a moment having earnestly eyed me displayed them.
  
  The wounds were in the hearts of the palms,
  Pierced to the backs like stigmata of crucifixion.
  
  The horrible
  raw flesh protruded, glistening
  And granular, not scabbed, nor a sign of infection.
  
  "These are
  old wounds.
  
  " He answered, "Yes.
  
  They don't heal.
  
  " He stood
  Moving his lips in silence, his back against that fabulous basin
  of mountains, fold beyond fold,
  Patches of forest and scarps of rock, high domes of dead gray
  pasture and gray beds of dry rivers,
  dear and particular in die burning air, too bright to appear real,
  to the last range
  The fog from the ocean like a stretched compacted thunderstorm
  overhung; and he said gravely:
  "I pick them open.
  
  I made them long ago with a clean steel.
  
  It
  is only a litde to pay"
  He stretched and flexed the fingers, I saw his sunburnt lips whiten
  in a line, compressed together,
  "If only it proves enough for a time to save so many.
  
  " I
  searched his face for madness but that
  Is often invisible, a subtle spirit.
  
  "There never," he said, "was
  any people earned so much ruin.
  
  I love them, I am trying to suffer for them.
  
  It would be bad if
  I should die, I am careful
  Against excess.
  
  " "You think of the wounds," I said, "of Jesus?
  
  "
  He laughed angrily and frowned, stroking
  The fingers of one hand with the other.
  
  "Religion is the people's
  opium.
  
  Your little Jew-God?
  
  My pain," he said with pride, "is voluntary.
  
  They have done what never was done before.
  
  Not as a people
  takes a land to love it and be fed,
  A little, according to need and love, and again a little; sparing
  the country tribes, mixing
  Their blood with theirs, their minds with all the rocks and rivers,
  their flesh with the soil: no, without hunger
  Wasting the world and your own labor, without love possessing,
  not even your hands to the dirt but plows
  Like blades of knives; heartless machines; houses of steel: using
  and despising the patient earth .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh, as a rich man eats a forest for profit and a field for vanity,
  so you came west and raped
  The continent and brushed its people to death.
  
  Without need,
  the weak skirmishing hunters, and without mercy.
  
  Well, God's a scarecrow; no vengeance out of old rags.
  
  But
  there are acts breeding their own reversals
  In their own bellies from the first day.
  
  I am here" he saidand
  broke off suddenly and said "They take horses
  And give them sicknesses through hollow needles, their blood
  saves babies: I am here on the mountain making
  Antitoxin for all the happy towns and farms, the lovely blameless
  children, the terrible
  Arrogant cities.
  
  I used to think them terrible: their gray prosperity,
  'their pride: from up here
  Specks of mildew.
  
  But when I am dead and all you with whole
  hands think of nothing but happiness,
  Will you go mad and kill each other?
  
  Or horror come over
  the ocean on wings and cover your sun?
  
  I wish," he said trembling, "I had never been born.
  
  "
  His wife came from the door while he was talking.
  
  Mine asked
  her quietly, "Do you live all alone here,
  Are you not afraid?
  
  " "Certainly not," she answered, "he is
  always gentle and loving.
  
  I have no complaint
  Except his groans in the night keep me awake often.
  
  But when
  I think of other women's
  Troubles: my own daughter's: I'm older than my husband, I
  have been married before: deep is my peace.
  
  "

• All The Little Hoofprints Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Farther up the gorge the sea's voice fainted and ceased.
  
  We heard a new noise far away ahead of us, vague and metallic,
  it might have been some unpleasant bird's voice
  Bedded in a matrix of long silences.
  
  At length we came to a little
  cabin lost in the redwoods,
  An old man sat on a bench before the doorway filing a cross-cut
  saw; sometimes he slept,
  Sometimes he filed.
  
  Two or three horses in the corral by the
  streamside lifted their heads
  To watch us pass, but the old man did not.
  
  In the afternoon we
  returned the same way,
  And had the picture in our minds of magnificent regions of space
  and mountain not seen before.
  
  (This was
  The first time that we visited Pigeon Gap, whence you look
  down behind the great shouldering pyramid-
  Edges of Pico Blanco through eagle-gulfs of air to a forest basin
  Where two-hundred-foot redwoods look like the pile on a Turkish
  carpet.
  
  ) With such extensions of the idol-
  Worshipping mind we came down the streamside.
  
  The old man
  was still at his post by the cabin doorway, but now
  Stood up and stared, said angrily "Where are you camping?
  
  "
  I said "We're not camping, we're going home.
  
  " He said
  From his flushed heavy face, "That's the way fires get started.
  
  Did you come at night?
  
  " "We passed you this morning.
  
  You were half asleep, filing a saw.
  
  " "I'll kill anybody that starts
  a fire here .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " his voice quavered
  Into bewilderment .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "I didn't see you.
  
  Kind of feeble I guess.
  
  My temperature's a hundred and two every afternoon.
  
  " "Why,
  what's the matter?
  
  " He removed his hat
  And rather proudly showed us a deep healed trench in the bald
  skull.
  
  "My horse fell at the ford,
  I must ‘a’ cracked my head on a rock.
  
  Well, sir, I can't remember
  anything till next morning.
  
  I woke in bed the pillow was soaked with blood, the horse was
  in the corral and had had his hay,"
  Singing the words as if he had told the story a hundred times.
  
  To whom?
  
  To himself, probably,
  "The saddle was on the rack and the bridle on the right nail.
  
  What do you think of that now?
  
  " He passed
  His hand on his bewildered forehead and said, "Unless an angel
  or something came down and did it.
  
  A basin of blood and water by the crick, I must 'a' washed myself.
  
  "
  My wife said sharply, "Have you been to a doctor?
  
  "
  "Oh yes," he said, "my boy happened down.
  
  " She said "You
  oughtn't to be alone here: are you all alone here?
  
  "
  "No," he answered, "horses.
  
  I've been all over the world: right
  here is the most beautiful place in the world.
  
  I played the piccolo in ships' orchestras.
  
  " We looked at the immense
  redwoods and dark Fern-taken slip of land by the creek, where the horses were,
  and the yuccaed hillsides high in the sun
  Flaring like torches; I said "Darkness comes early here.
  
  " He answered
  with pride and joy, "Two hundred and eighty-
  Five days in the year the sun never gets in here.
  
  Like living under the sea, green all summer, beautiful.
  
  " My wife
  said, "How do you know your temperature's
  A hundred and two?
  
  " "Eh?
  
  The doctor.
  
  He said the bone
  Presses my brain, he's got to cut out a piece.
  
  I said 'All right,
  you've got to wait till it rains,
  I've got to guard my place through the fire-season.
  
  ' By God,"
  he said joyously,
  "The quail on my roof wake me up every morning, then I look
  out the window and a dozen deer
  Drift up the canyon with the mist on their shoulders.
  
  Look in
  the dust at your feet, all the little hoofprints,"

• An Artist Read Poem Log in to favourite

  That sculptor we knew, the passionate-eyed son of a quarryman,
  Who astonished Rome and Paris in his meteor youth, and then
  was gone, at his high tide of triumphs,
  Without reason or good-bye; I have seen him again lately, after
  twenty years, but not in Europe.
  
  In desert hills I rode a horse slack-kneed with thirst.
  
  Down a
  steep slope a dancing swarm
  Of yellow butterflies over a shining rock made me hope water.
  
  We slid down to the place,
  The spring was bitter but the horse drank.
  
  I imagined wearings
  of an old path from that wet rock
  Ran down the canyon; I followed, soon they were lost, I came
  to a stone valley in which it seemed
  No man nor his mount had ever ventured, you wondered
  whether even a vulture'd ever spread sail there.
  
  There were stones of strange form under a cleft in the far hill;
  I tethered the horse to a rock
  And scrambled over.
  
  A heap like a stone torrent, a moraine,
  But monstrously formed limbs of broken carving appeared in
  the rock-fall, enormous breasts, defaced heads
  Of giants, the eyes calm through the brute veils of fracture.
  
  It
  was natural then to climb higher and go in
  Up the cleft gate.
  
  The canyon was a sheer-walled crack winding
  at the entrance, but around its bend
  The walls grew dreadful with stone giants, presences growing
  out of the rigid precipice, that strove
  In dream between stone and life, intense to cast their chaos .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  or to enter and return .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  stone-fleshed, nerve-stretched
  Great bodies ever more beautiful and more heavy with pain,
  they seemed leading to some unbearable
  Consummation of the ecstasy .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  but there, troll among
  Titans, the bearded master of the place accosted me
  In a cold anger, a mallet in his hand, filthy and ragged.
  
  There
  was no kindness in that man's mind,
  But after he had driven me down to the entrance he spoke a
  little.
  
  The merciless sun had found the slot now
  To hide in, and lit for the wick of that stone lamp-bowl a sky
  almost, I thought, abominably beautiful;
  While our lost artist we used to admire: for now I knew him:
  spoke of his passion.
  
  He said, "Marble?
  
  White marble is fit to model a snow-mountain: let man be
  modest.
  
  Nor bronze: I am bound to have my tool
  In my material, no irrelevances.
  
  I found this pit of dark-gray
  freestone, fine-grained, and tough enough
  To make sketches that under any weathering will last my lifetime…
  The town is eight miles off, I can fetch food and no one follows
  me home.
  
  I have water and a cave
  Here; and no possible lack of material.
  
  I need, therefore, nothing.
  
  As to companions, I make them.
  
  And models?
  
  They are seldom wanted; I know a Basque shepherd
  I sometimes use; and a woman of the town.
  
  What more?
  
  Sympathy?
  
  Praise?
  
  I have never desired them and
  also I have never deserved them.
  
  I will not show you
  More than the spalls you saw by accident.
  
  What I see is the enormous
  beauty of things, but what I attempt
  Is nothing to that.
  
  I am helpless toward that.
  
  It is only to form in stone the mould of some ideal humanity
  that might be worthy to be
  Under that lightning.
  
  Animalcules that God (if he were given
  to laughter) might omit to laugh at.
  
  Those children of my hands are tortured, because they feel,"
  he said, "the storm of the outer magnificence.
  
  They are giants in agony.
  
  They have seen from my eyes
  The man-destroying beauty of the dawns over their notch
  yonder, and all the obliterating stars.
  
  But in their eyes they have peace.
  
  I have lived a little and I
  think
  Peace marrying pain alone can breed that excellence in the
  luckless race, might make it decent
  To exist at all on the star-lit stone breast.
  
  I hope," he said, "that
  when I grow old and the chisel drops,
  I may crawl out on a ledge of the rock and die like a wolf.
  
  "
  These
  fragments are all I can remember,
  These in the flare of the desert evening.
  
  Having been driven
  so brutally forth I never returned;
  Yet I respect him enough to keep his name and the place secret.
  
  I hope that some other traveller
  May stumble on that ravine of Titans after their maker has
  died.
  
  While he lives, let him alone.

• Ante Mortem Read Poem Log in to favourite

  It is likely enough that lions and scorpions
  Guard the end; life never was bonded to be endurable nor the
  act of dying
  Unpainful; the brain burning too often
  Earns, though it held itself detached from the object, often a
  burnt age.
  
  No matter, I shall not shorten it by hand.
  
  Incapable of body or unmoved of brain is no evil, one always
  went envying
  The quietness of stones.
  
  But if the striped blossom
  Insanity spread lewd splendors and lightning terrors at the end
  of the forest;
  Or intolerable pain work its known miracle,
  Exile the monarch soul, set a sick monkey in the office .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  remember me
  Entire and balanced when I was younger,
  And could lift stones, and comprehend in the praises the cruelties
  of life.

• Antrim Read Poem Log in to favourite

  No spot of earth where men have so fiercely for ages of time
  Fought and survived and cancelled each other,
  Pict and Gael and Dane, McQuillan, Clandonnel, O'Neill,
  Savages, the Scot, the Norman, the English,
  Here in the narrow passage and the pitiless north, perpetual
  Betrayals, relentless resultless fighting.
  
  A random fury of dirks in the dark: a struggle for survival
  Of hungry blind cells of life in the womb.
  
  But now the womb has grown old, her strength has gone forth;
  a few red carts in a fog creak flax to the dubs,
  And sheep in the high heather cry hungrily that life is hard; a
  plaintive peace; shepherds and peasants.
  
  We have felt the blades meet in the flesh in a hundred ambushes
  And the groaning blood bubble in the throat;
  In a hundred battles the heavy axes bite the deep bone,
  The mountain suddenly stagger and be darkened.
  
  Generation on generation we have seen the blood of boys
  And heard the moaning of women massacred,
  The passionate flesh and nerves have flamed like pitch-pine and
  fallen
  And lain in the earth softly dissolving.
  
  I have lain and been humbled in all these graves, and mixed new
  flesh with the old and filled the hollow of my mouth
  With maggots and rotten dust and ages of repose.
  
  I lie here and
  plot the agony of resurrection.

• Apology For Bad Dreams Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  In the purple light, heavy with redwood, the slopes drop seaward,
  Headlong convexities of forest, drawn in together to the steep
  ravine.
  
  Below, on the sea-cliff,
  A lonely clearing; a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof
  under spared trees.
  
  Then the ocean
  Like a great stone someone has cut to a sharp edge and polished
  to shining.
  
  Beyond it, the fountain
  And furnace of incredible light flowing up from the sunk sun.
  
  In the little clearing a woman
  Is punishing a horse; she had tied the halter to a sapling at the
  edge of the wood, but when the great whip
  Clung to the flanks the creature kicked so hard she feared he
  would snap the halter; she called from the house
  The young man her son; who fetched a chain tie-rope, they
  working together
  Noosed the small rusty links round the horse's tongue
  And tied him by the swollen tongue to the tree.
  
  Seen from this height they are shrunk to insect size.
  
  Out of all human relation.
  
  You cannot distinguish
  The blood dripping from where the chain is fastened,
  The beast shuddering; but the thrust neck and the legs
  Far apart.
  
  You can see the whip fall on the flanks .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The gesture of the arm.
  
  You cannot see the face of the woman.
  
  The enormous light beats up out of the west across the cloud-bars
  of the trade-wind.
  
  The ocean
  Darkens, the high clouds brighten, the hills darken together.
  
  Unbridled and unbelievable beauty
  Covers the evening world .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  not covers, grows apparent out
  of it, as Venus down there grows out
  From the lit sky.
  
  What said the prophet?
  
  "I create good: and
  I create evil: I am the Lord.
  
  "
  II
  This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places,
  (The quiet ones ask for quieter suffering: but here the granite cliff
  the gaunt cypresses crown
  Demands what victim?
  
  The dykes of red lava and black what
  Titan?
  
  The hills like pointed flames
  Beyond Soberanes, the terrible peaks of the bare hills under the
  sun, what immolation?
  
  )
  This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and
  like the passionate spirit of humanity
  Pain for its bread: God's, many victims', the painful deaths, the
  horrible transfigurements: I said in my heart,
  "Better invent than suffer: imagine victims
  Lest your own flesh be chosen the agonist, or you
  Martyr some creature to the beauty of the place.
  
  " And I said,
  "Burn sacrifices once a year to magic
  Horror away from the house, this little house here
  You have built over the ocean with your own hands
  Beside the standing boulders: for what are we,
  The beast that walks upright, with speaking lips
  And little hair, to think we should always be fed,
  Sheltered, intact, and self-controlled?
  
  We sooner more liable
  Than the other animals.
  
  Pain and terror, the insanities of desire;
  not accidents but essential,
  And crowd up from the core:" I imagined victims for those
  wolves, I made them phantoms to follow,
  They have hunted the phantoms and missed the house.
  
  It is not
  good to forget over what gulfs the spirit
  Of the beauty of humanity, the petal of a lost flower blown
  seaward by the night-wind, floats to its quietness.
  
  III
  Boulders blunted like an old bear's teeth break up from the
  headland; below them
  All the soil is thick with shells, the tide-rock feasts of a dead
  people.
  
  Here the granite flanks are scarred with ancient fire, the ghosts
  of the tribe
  Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire, they try to remember
  the sunlight,
  Light has died out of their skies.
  
  These have paid something for
  the future
  Luck of the country, while we living keep old griefs in memory:
  though God's
  Envy is not a likely fountain of ruin, to forget evils calls down
  Sudden reminders from the cloud: remembered deaths be our
  redeemers;
  Imagined victims our salvation: white as the half moon at midnight
  Someone flamelike passed me, saying, "I am Tamar Cauldwell,
  I have my desire,"
  Then the voice of the sea returned, when she had gone by, the
  stars to their towers.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Beautiful country burn again, Point Pinos down to the
  Sur Rivers
  Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the
  Carmel water.
  
  IV
  He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor
  From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents
  victims, is only the ape of that God.
  
  He washes it out with tears and many waters, calcines it with
  fire in the red crucible,
  Deforms it, makes it horrible to itself: the spirit flies out and
  stands naked, he sees the spirit,
  He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom
  is broken, the power that massed it
  Cries to the power that moves the stars, "I have come home to
  myself, behold me.
  
  I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me
  In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth,
  Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments,
  And here am I moving the stars that are me.
  
  "
  I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
  For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
  
  He being sufficient might be still.
  
  I think they admit no reason;
  they are the ways of my love.
  
  Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: no
  thought apparent but burns darkly
  Smothered with its own smoke in the human brain-vault: no
  thought outside: a certain measure in phenomena:
  The fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland,
  the ever-returning roses of dawn.

• Ascent To The Sierras Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Beyond the great valley an odd instinctive rising
  Begins to possess the ground, the flatness gathers to little humps and
  barrows, low aimless ridges,
  A sudden violence of rock crowns them.
  
  The crowded orchards end, they
  have come to a stone knife;
  The farms are finished; the sudden foot of the sierra.
  
  Hill over hill,
  snow-ridge beyond mountain gather
  The blue air of their height about them.
  
  Here at the foot of the pass
  The fierce clans of the mountain you'd think for thousands of years,
  Men with harsh mouths and eyes like the eagles' hunger,
  Have gathered among these rocks at the dead hour
  Of the morning star and the stars waning
  To raid the plain and at moonrise returning driven
  Their scared booty to the highlands, the tossing horns
  And glazed eyes in the light of torches.
  
  The men have looked back
  Standing above these rock-heads to bark laughter
  At the burning granaries and the farms and the town
  That sow the dark flat land with terrible rubies .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  lighting the dead .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It is
  not true: from this land
  The curse was lifted; the highlands have kept peace with the valleys; no
  blood in the sod; there is no old sword
  Keeping grim rust, no primal sorrow.
  
  The people are all one people, their
  homes never knew harrying;
  The tribes before them were acorn-eaters, harmless as deer.
  
  Oh, fortunate
  earth; you must find someone
  To make you bitter music; how else will you take bonds of the future,
  against the wolf in men's hearts?

• At The Birth Of An Age Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The story is derived from the closing chapters of the Volsung
  Saga, the action of which refers itself to a date fairly correspondent
  with the end of the Greco-Roman age and the beginning of this one.
  
  The theme of self-contradiction and self-frustration, in Gudrun's
  nature, intends to express a characteristic quality of this
  culture-age, which I think should be called the Christian age, for
  it is conditioned by Christianity, and except a few centuries'
  lag concurrent with it.
  
  Its civilization is the greatest, but also
  the most bewildered and self-contradictory, the least integrated,
  in some phases the most ignoble, that has ever existed.
  
  All these
  qualities, together with the characteristic restlessness of the age,
  its energy, its extremes of hope and fear, its passion for discovery,
  I think are bred from the tension between its two poles, of
  Western blood and superimposed Oriental religion.
  
  This is the
  tension that drew taut the frail arches of Gothic cathedrals, as
  now it spins the frail cosmogonies of recent science and the
  brittle Utopias of economic theory.
  
  This tension is really the
  soul of the age, which will begin to die when it ceases.
  
  In modern
  times the direction of the tension has shifted a little; the Christian
  faith is becoming extinct as an influence, compensatorily the
  Christian ethic becomes more powerful and conscious, manifesting
  itself as generalized philanthropy, liberalism, socialism, communism,
  and so forth.
  
  But the tension is relaxed, the age prepares
  for its long decline.
  
  The racial pole is weakened by the physical
  and especially the spiritual hybridization that civilized life always
  brings with it; the Christian pole is undergoing constant attrition!
  steadily losing a little more than it gains.
  
  I believe that we live about the summit of the wave of this age,
  and hence can see it more objectively, looking down toward the
  troughs on both sides, than our ancestors could or our more remote
  descendants will.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Is it necessary to add that I am not
  speaking as one of the prophets?
  
  These are only ideas that came
  to me while I was writing what follows, when I wondered "Why
  does Gudrun act this way?
  
  " Thence they added themselves to
  the thought of the poem, and are noted here to explain one
  tendency of its thought.
  
  The others seem clear enough.
  
  When the north and the east crawled with armed tribes toward
  mindless wars,
  Barbarians like a shieldful of knives flung random, clashing together,
  stabbing, gashing or missing
  Through the north darkness, Goth, Hun and Vandal, Saxon and
  Frank, and down the hopeless frontiers of Rome:
  Three men leading three hundred came to the edge of the forest
  to a murdered farm.
  
  Hoegni said laughing,
  "Hey for the owner!" And Gunnar: "Ay.
  
  He hangs there.
  
  " For a
  haltered man
  Hung in the oak above the fire-crumbled walls.
  
  "This is the
  place she named to us: the dead man's farm,
  A hill over a plain, a hanged man, a choked well, a stream at the
  hill-foot.
  
  Let them drop the gear.
  
  "
  But Hoegni: "I say go on," jutting his chin to the south, the sharp
  yellow beard,
  "We'll meet the sooner.
  
  Aah, camp here waiting
  While they loot Gaul?
  
  " "Wolf-eagerness is a treasure in warriors,
  caution in kings," answered Gunnar,
  Called king for being the head of a little clan between the Saxons
  and Franks; his eyes were royal
  Over the thick brown beard, deep and ice-blue, dark-browed,
  "If Gudrun comes, and gives bonds and promises,
  Yet I shall probably turn you back and lead home.
  
  I am not in
  love with letting my naked face
  Into the bear's mouth.
  
  " His brother Hoegni groaned and laughed
  but not spoke.
  
  Then Carling his youngest brother,
  A boy still, beardless, brave face, wide eyes, bright hair: "I shall
  not turn.
  
  Look, brother, how it is clouded
  With herds of horses like a summer heaven, clouds beyond
  clouds, I never saw anything nor heard a poem
  So beautiful as this plain.
  
  Yonder must be the Horde's encampment: like a hundred cities:
  and the horses, the horses, the many-colored,
  At pasture around it like a vast wheel.
  
  There, there, and there,
  are the towers of smoke from the burnt towns.
  
  Yonder a band of war-men far off goes galloping on some great
  raid.
  
  Sigurd had a horse;
  He called him Grayfell.
  
  " Gunnar said: "Listen, boy.
  
  You shall
  have horses to ride if we go down there.
  
  But Sigurd is not to be named.
  
  Sigurd is not to be named.
  
  Remember
  we are making peace with Gudrun,
  Who is our sister, and has grown powerful too.
  
  " Hoegni laughed,
  Carling said, "I know.
  
  It is a pity.
  
  Oh Gunnar it seems to me that my spirit,
  After the close fields and forest at home, flies towering up to
  the sun like a noon eagle
  Above this plain, the space the distance, the immense green freedom
  glimmering to blue: as if I could almost
  See Rome from here.
  
  " Hoegni said, "Live and we'll see it; if those
  Goths have left anything.
  
  Meanwhile we'll feed.
  
  They'll have to hack firewood from the owner's oak, it's all that's
  left him.
  
  He will not care.
  
  " "Oh Hoegni!" Carling
  Answered, "Oh Gunnar! When Gudrun comes and we've dearly
  greeted her, then let us
  Not seek the Hun's camp nor friendship with him, but suddenly
  help ourselves to keen horses and alone together
  Go and see Italy.
  
  Oh Gunnar! that would be the high path for heroes, no talk, no
  alliances.
  
  I know Sigurd would do it
  If he were living.
  
  Ride southward like a pointed storm of wild
  swans, like a flying lance-head, an axe-head,
  Carve our own valley through the Huns and Romans.
  
  " "What
  a pity," Hoegni said,
  "To be a fool at sixteen.
  
  I warned you Gunnar,
  Leave Fool at home.
  
  " "A flight of horsemen," the youth said
  gladly, "this way.
  
  Oh look, Oh the lovely fellowship,
  Like a long arrow burning with dust for smoke.
  
  " "You have
  young eyes.
  
  Ay.
  
  That will be Gudrun.
  
  How many?
  
  " He answered, "They ride by
  fours, less or more.
  
  Some ten ranks: forty perhaps.
  
  "
  "Hardskin and Swayn," Gunnar said.
  
  "Ay," they answered,
  "Patrol the wood-path until I call you.
  
  You east and he west.
  
  Not to be embraced from behind as well.
  
  She left us in white
  anger, I will not trust her yet.
  
  "
  II
  Gudrun dismounted and came to her brothers; tall, blonde and
  pale, clad in a wine-dark gold-threaded
  Wide cloak, snatch of some Byzantine altar, sweetly smiling
  came Gudrun; a black-haired slave-woman,
  A face like white wax, walked at her side; on the other a
  swarthy sword-wearing Hun, who scowled and spoke.
  
  Two more behind him watched hard under slant brows.
  
  Then
  Gudrun: "Dear brothers! Gunnar: will you bid your men
  Go ten steps back?
  
  Timor here .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  this dark-browed battle-rememberer
  Is Timor, he is lofty in my lord's attendance.
  
  My three brothers,
  Timor.
  
  He is full of safeguards, being as he says
  Accountable for the priceless treasure of my person.
  
  GUNNAR   (waving his men back) Well, sister.
  
  Twenty.
  
  GUDRUN   My Timor is very faithful,
  And fears .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  never death .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  torture.
  
  Can that be Carling?
  
  Oh my dear, Carling, how beautiful you have grown!
  I always loved you.
  
  GUNNAR   We were most happy, Gudrun,
  In your dear message.
  
  Jealousies die but love is immortal.
  
  We
  have come at great pains through the wet woods
  Only to see your face.
  
  I say only,
  Because it is certain that we are wealthy enough
  Without Hunnish alliances.
  
  Our thought in coming is toward
  you only; to see the loved face, salute
  The dear lips, and return.
  
  HOEGNI   And ask you how it feels to be married
  to a toad, for every man told us
  Huns look like toads: and by God it's true.
  
  Pop eyes, no noses,
  toad color .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   Hoegni!
  Be wary of your words a little.
  
  HOEGNI   Not I.
  
  GUNNAR   As to the precious gatherings
  of Gaul and Italy: what's gold?
  
  We came for love's sake.
  
  GUDRUN   (to Hoegni) He understands it well enough,
  Though for scorn he won't speak it.
  
  HOEGNI   Tim Timy you mean?
  
  For scorn you say?
  
  I am telling you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   Understand me,
  Hoegni.
  
  My lord and his race are not mocked.
  
  The emperor of
  northern and middle Europe, all from the Caspian
  To the North Sea.
  
  HOEGNI   Not a toad?
  
  Nose-holes
  Where a nose ought to be .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   And soon I believe to conquer
  and rule the whole nation-written
  War-weary tablet, all the king-scarred earth.
  
  HOEGNI   Not me.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  That
  is a marvelous piece of a victory
  Worn on your shoulders, Gudrun.
  
  Well, you look young still.
  
  GUDRUN   And for gold: look at these
  Bracelets that bruise my arms; and this neck-chain.
  
  HOEGNI   Oh, he loads
  you.
  
  Save up, save up,
  Lest winter come.
  
  GUDRUN   The chain's for King Gunnar.
  
  No: I pray
  you, brother, take it with my love.
  
  Though I was bitter,
  That was quite long ago.
  
  And now I live among foreigners .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUNNAR   How your lips writhe!
  Don't cry, my dear,
  I'll not refuse it nor the love either, but joyfully.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Let me
  kiss you Gudrun, why do you cover your face?
  
  I'll kiss the tears.
  
  GUDRUN   It was caught in my hair.
  
  There.
  
  You've a
  tress with it.
  
  Ah, Gunnar,
  Little you know!
  GUNNAR   Dear sister.
  
  I am far more glad that our love
  is born again
  Than for all these great links of gold.
  
  GUDRUN   And for my .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  brother
  Hoegni, these .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  HOEGNI   Don't do it
  If it hurts you so.
  
  You're white as death,
  Snow-girl.
  
  GUDRUN   I remember you used to call me that.
  
  We were near
  the same age.
  
  HOEGNI   But now those blue eyes of yours
  Have wolves in 'em.
  
  GUDRUN   The better to see you with, dear! Well,
  I've been through .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and seen stark battles: but if
  These eyes grow hard: not toward my brothers, Hoegni.
  
  Bygones
  are by-gones, that wound's hid .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  healed I mean.
  
  You never knew me to lie I believe?
  
  So take the bracelets.
  
  I guess
  them nearly the weight in gold
  Of Gunnar's chain.
  
  HOEGNI   Thank you, Gudrun.
  
  I wish to do you sometime
  a worthy service.
  
  Why, men
  Have fought to death for less than a hundredth fraction
  Of this heavy glitter.
  
  GUDRUN   It's nothing: we swim in it.
  
  Carling dear:
  I've something .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I find myself
  Wet-eyed to look at you.
  
  Because you were much younger than me and Hoegni.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I'm
  not false, I'll hide no thought, if you'd been tall
  At that time, I believe you'd have helped me.
  
  Who knows?
  
  Hush, dear, let me dream.
  
  This is very vain talk
  About an old woe.
  
  The snows of that year are melted and so is
  my heart, and I am Attila's wife.
  
  You look like ghosts, ah?
  
  All but Carling.
  
  Oh, it's wiped out.
  
  I thought you, Carling, too noble-minded .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  young I should
  say .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  to care about gold, and so have chosen you
  A steel jewel, only a sword, yet a rare one.
  
  Give it to me, Jukka.
  
  (She takes it from one of the dark 'warriors behind her.
  
  ) It
  is said there were great enamel-workers
  And godlike smiths in Gaul before the back-and-forth grovellings
  and wash of war
  Wiped out all.
  
  CARLING   Oh Gudrun! What are these gems?
  
  Why, the
  hawk-head hilt
  Is like a firebrand.
  
  GUDRUN   The blade, the blade.
  
  The hilt's nothing, a
  gem-crust.
  
  Nor the scabbard either.
  
  See
  How cunningly they let the delicate-colored threads of enamel
  Into the fierce blank steel.
  
  CARLING   Oh Gudrun.
  
  GUDRUN   Hawk or eagle the pretty
  tracery, who cares?
  
  It's pretty, ah?
  
  I begged it of my lord when he was merry.
  
  CARLING   I cannot tell you.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh Gudrun.
  
  GUNNAR   By God, what a smith.
  
  I think
  You've the best, brother, (to Hoegni, quietly , nodding toward
  the oak) I don't like those two, the ravens.
  
  HOEGNI   Mm?
  
  Those?
  
  Children of nature, attracted by meat like you and me.
  
  They
  take the eyes first.
  
  GUNNAR  Caw caw, damn them!
  Though they're God's birds.
  
  Is she true?
  
  HOEGNI   It's true gold.
  
  CARLING   (admiring the sword) Oh Gudrun,
  the beauty, the power, the balance! And as for the edge:
  Look at my thumb: I barely touched it to feel it.
  
  GUDRUN   Oh, Oh, my gift!
  CARLING   ButI love the slight cut.
  
  I think it's magical: see, I streak my own blood on the silky
  blade, that makes it mine for my life-days
  Faithfully.
  
  Oh sister, I'll do such deeds with it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  some deed
  for the poets to remember in all the fire-lit music-filled
  Evenings of rime.
  
  Sigurd's great beautiful bone-biter, the sword
  That he called Anger, never did such a deed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I didn't mean, I didn't want .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I adore his memory.
  
  HOEGNI   Fool.
  
  GUDRUN   I know, dear.
  
  Hush, Hoegni, let
  him alone.
  
  We may love Sigurd and yet
  Not hate his .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  killers.
  
  He was too great to need any memory
  but thoughts of love .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  to need any
  Reprisal.
  
  His fame's not slain.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What'll you call the sword,
  Carling?
  
  CARLING   I thought of calling him
  Sea-eagle.
  
  Ah Sea-eagle you'll fly in Rome,
  You'll dazzle the south.
  
  ONE OF GUNNAR'S MEN   (shouting from a distance)
  Troop of horse, a long one.
  
  ANOTHER   From the west by the wood's edge.
  
  HARDSKIN   (farther off) A thousand horse.
  
  HOEGNI Bitten, by God.
  
  (Gunnar and Hoegni draw sword, so
  do the Huns.
  
  )
  GUNNAR   I will never believe, Gudrun, no never.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Timor: we are here
  As friends, probable allies .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  HOEGNI   Baited and trapped,
  with a yellow glitter
  And milky talk, (shouting) Stand to it.
  
  Ham-string'em, that
  stops'em.
  
  (to Timor) .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Well?
  
  Toad?
  
  Let's begin.
  
  GUDRUN   (cuffing her slave-woman, who was about to scream)
  You are too excitable, you shame me red,
  brothers, before
  These quiet dark lords of the East.
  
  Those are the horses to mount
  you.
  
  Each man of that troop leads a spare horse.
  
  And thus you trust me! I could not allow you to walk, you and
  your people,
  To die Emperor's camp.
  
  GUNNAR   Ay?
  
  why do they come from behind
  and cut us off from the wood?
  
  GUDRUN   They come from the pasture.
  
  GUNNAR   So it takes five hundred men
  To bring us mounts?
  
  GUDRUN   For your escort also.
  
  There's rough work
  On the plain.
  
  GUNNAR   There'd be rougher
  If my poor woodsmen forked themselves over horses.
  
  No, Gudrun.
  
  GUDRUN   The Huns despise you if you come walking.
  
  GUNNAR   Are we your prisoners?
  
  GUDRUN   Why, brother!
  GUNNAR   No?
  
  Then
  farewell, Gudrun.
  
  We carry back to the great fir-woods, the lonely tarns
  And little clearings, magnificent memories
  Of wealth and kingly splendor and kindness, and a sister's great
  Forgiving heart.
  
  HOEGNI   And toads.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Come home with us,
  We'll make you queen of the North.
  
  CARLING   Oh.
  
  I want to ride with her.
  
  GUDRUN   But since I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  love you, my brothers: how could
  I let you go?
  
  I'd even keep you
  By force.
  
  You see: by force .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Of loving persuasion.
  
  I could hardly persuade my Huns
  To let such warriors as you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  not join the Horde.
  
  Gunnar: he will conquer the whole world, there's not a doubt:
  All the wealth, all rings of gold, all tribes of men, all the meat
  and drink:
  It rolls to his feet like a ball.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Hoegni:
  Do you love battles?
  
  HOEGNI   In moderation, in moderation.
  
  GUDRUN   This would be out of scale for you, then.
  
  Now the great crowning battle of the world is making, to
  dazzle all war
  Before and after, will be fought on this plain within three days.
  
  For Rome has bandaged all her sick legions
  Into one sword, ransacked her waning moon for man-power,
  and bought peace with the West Goths
  (Whose king Theodoric is eight feet tall) to try odds against
  us.
  
  They have joined the two armies like axe and helve
  For one huge stroke.
  
  Their last one.
  
  HOEGNI   Is Caesar a tall man too?
  
  GUDRUN   Which Caesar?
  
  None fights.
  
  They've an active general,
  What's his name?
  
  I can't think.
  
  They are hundreds of thousands
  together, and ours are three hundred thousand, with the
  East Goths,
  Vandals, Gepidae, Franks .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  HOEGNI   Boo, said the goose
  Counting duckweed.
  
  GUDRUN   What?
  
  HOEGNI   Tell it to the Swedes, not to us.
  
  GUNNAR   No, no, we don't doubt
  Your good faith, sister: yet there's a dreamy quality
  About these numberings of multitude.
  
  How could such hordes
  be fed?
  
  GUDRUN   Ours, are experienced.
  
  They tap their horses' neck-veins and suck the blood, then stop
  the wound and ride on.
  
  Or a man's at a pinch,
  Ah, Timor?
  
  The Goths and Romans I imagine starve.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh, this
  Meeting will exceed all measure, enormous, a sword-mountain:
  you'll stay and see it?
  
  And, Carling, after we force them
  For the sun will fall out of heaven before Attila
  Fails of a victory the whole fragrant south will lie open, unlocked
  and helpless, all the sun, all the honey,
  Rich gardens, rare fruits, all kinds of artist-work.
  
  We'll ride on
  the golden strands of blue seas and drink nothing
  But purple wine, hear nothing but little Greek slaves
  That sing like nightingales.
  
  GUNNAR   Will you swear by the holiest,
  By Woden hanged on tree; and by all the Gods of the Huns too,
  and all other Gods,
  That you mean well by us?
  
  GUDRUN    cannot imagine why you mistrust me.
  
  GUNNAR   Will you swear?
  
  GUDRUN   Why should I?
  
  You have no choice.
  
  And you mistrust me vilely.
  
  And what are the Gods, who sees
  them?
  
  My Huns have travelled the whole world and now
  Laugh at the Gods.
  
  Yes, I will swear.
  
  GUNNAR   By Woden hanged on the tree?
  
  GUDRUN   Oh, clearly.
  
  And by all the Huns' Gods,
  And the Roman Christ.
  
  GUNNAR   You will be sick and die
  If you break oath.
  
  Well, Hoegni?
  
  HOEGNI   I want to see old Hardskin
  straddling a horse, that's what I want.
  
  CARLING   They'll go.
  
  Oh Gudrun
  how beautiful you look.
  
  One to stand shining
  And sworded for the Decider of Battles in the eagle sky
  In the poem that I've been making.
  
  GUDRUN   Do you make poems, Carling?
  
  CARLING   Things are so beautiful.
  
  Your face, like a white sword
  Lifting against the blue.
  
  I'll make better ones.
  
  GUDRUN   Sing me a poem
  While we ride down.
  
  I need it.
  
  Life narrows on me,
  All its events are vicious, whichever I choose.
  
  III
  In front of the curtains.
  
  Sentinels post themselves in the midst.
  
  Men enter and stand conversing at the extreme right.
  
  Gudrun and
  her brothers, her slave Chrysothemis, and the Hun Jukka, come
  in from the left.
  
  GUNNAR   .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The pastures are wide and rich, yet all the grass
  is bitten to the roots.
  
  What was that river we forded?
  
  GUDRUN   I told you.
  
  The Marne.
  
  We have to wait here until
  the trumpet is blown; no one may enter before Attila.
  
  HOEGNI   I wish him joy of it.
  
  GUNNAR   Marne; the Marne.
  
  What a language.
  
  Hoegni: did you
  notice the herd of thick-flanked brood-mares?
  
  I believe there
  were at least two thousand.
  
  These things are out of our scale
  of thought.
  
  HOEGNI   Bah!
  GUDRUN   This building is an old broken place, curtained for the
  feast.
  
  The broken country-house of some dead Roman.
  
  The
  curtains look richly purple in the evening sun, don't they,
  Carling?
  
  If blood would keep its color, what a dye.
  
  And
  cheap.
  
  CARLING   Does he not come to bring you in?
  
  As I remember
  Sig .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I remember Sigurd used to?
  
  GUDRUN   No.
  
  GUNNAR   Tell me, sister: what do they do when their mares
  foal on the march?
  
  GUDRUN   (impatient) Ah! Another time.
  
  Ask Jukka.
  
  GUNNAR   I have asked him a number of questions, he only
  gabbles.
  
  It is essential for a ruler to understand .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   Will you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I am trying to make a quietness in my
  mind.
  
  HOEGNI   Yes.
  
  I have watched you, Gudrun.
  
  You are mad with
  pride.
  
  You think you have married the mountain of the world.
  
  Sigurd
  was not enough .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUNNAR   By the honor of God, brother!
  Keep the peace, will you?
  
  HOEGNI   Aahh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   I'll tell you plainly then.
  
  I am ill in my mind.
  
  Pride?
  
  No: hardly.
  
  I was proud while Sigurd lived, before you
  killed him, but as things are
  I've won back a little .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  power .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  not pride.
  
  Perhaps you
  will be able to tell me, being wise, Gunnar,
  Why it is that I.
  
  For it seems that I still love you, for all your.
  
  I am not able.
  
  We're the one blood,
  And were gay when we were little together,
  Yet, when the warmth wins, I remember that yours was the
  cold contemptible mind that planned his death
  Because your woman wound you up to be envious.
  
  And the
  cynical hand
  Was my brother Hoegni's.
  
  And how cowardly it was done.
  
  HOEGNI   (handling his sword-hilt)
  I guessed you.
  
  Bring on your niggers.
  
  GUNNAR   You are bound by the highest and most dangerous of
  oaths, Gudrun.
  
  GUDRUN  (impassively) So that my heart is in heavy trouble between
  love and hatred.
  
  Two snakes in one coil.
  
  Which can neither endure nor destroy
  each other, but each is swollen to bursting with venom
  From the other's jaws, it spurts on my heart.
  
  Ah?
  
  Well?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Well, that's how it is wi' me.
  
  I was saying, to do you a harm would never make Sigurd live,
  nor be any comfort to myself, so breathe easily.
  
  Carling's
  a poet: do you think killed men want justice, Carling?
  
  Don't
  answer.
  
  I think they're nothing, they're lucky.
  
  I believe
  nothing.
  
  After you've travelled and seen ten thousand corpses
  You'll keep your poems in the way of nature.
  
  GUNNAR   Indeed, sister, these questions about death are mysteries
  to all of us; it is wisest perhaps .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   The men with the red straps wound to the knees are
  East-Goth nobles.
  
  That tall man, who is talking to the Hun,
  is Alberic the Frank.
  
  Yonder are two lords of the Gepidae.
  
  I love to see kings cooling their heels at my husband's pleasure.
  
  GUNNAR   And those to the left, Gudrun?
  
  GUDRUN   Huns.
  
  Don't question me! I am not patient.
  
  A TRUMPETER   appears between the parting curtains.
  
  He sounds
  the trumpet, and announces in Htmnish and in Gothic:
  The Lord of Lords has taken his seat.
  
  The Masters of War have
  taken their seats.
  
  HOEGNI  The Toads have squatted.
  
  The curtains draw aside, and they enter.
  
  IV
  It is the atrium of a ruined Roman country-house.
  
  The walls at
  this end are broken down; the wall seen slant on the left is arcaded
  with freestone columns, the near ones broken, the farther
  entire.
  
  Strange guests have stopped here since the owner fled.
  
  The wall at the back has no colonnade but is adorned with wallpaintings;
  the panels to left and right indistinguishable, the great
  central painting scarred but clear.
  
  It represents Prometheus bound
  on Mt.
  
  Elboros, the snow-veined rocks, the wound and the
  vultures.
  
  Planks on trestles range parallel to the walks, making an L-shaped
  table.
  
  On the far limb of the (inverted) L, below the colossal
  Prometheus, Attila is seated among his generals.
  
  He is swarthy,
  thick, gray-haired, with a flat Mongolian face, and robed in barbarian
  magnificence.
  
  He is already feeding and drinking.
  
  Gudrun will take a place near the angle of the L, keeping Carling
  on her right, allowing Gunnar to sit on her left, toward Attila
  and beside Timor.
  
  Gudrwts slave stands behind her.
  
  Hoegni sits
  between Carting and Jukka.
  
  The other guests, Huns, Ostrogoths
  and so forth, are coming in and finding places, and servants
  are busy.
  
  GUDRUN   (standing at her place) My lord.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  My lord.
  
  ATTILA   (at length turning his face toward her) All right?
  
  GUDRUN   This is King Gunnar, my brother, of whom I spoke.
  
  And my other brothers.
  
  ATTILA   Mm.
  
  Welcome, (turning back to one of the Huns)
  I say if Arval fails taking Troyes as he slacked at Orleans,
  that is the end for him.
  
  GUNNAR   Noble Attila:
  Our sister having by message invited us
  We come with clear good will and kingly confidence
  To behold her face, and yours, and the glory of the Horde.
  
  She has flown high, she was nourished in a high nest.
  
  We have strong places northward and power of warriors,
  Though fewer .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  horses, I believe .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And not as a guest from wandering, but as the king
  Your brother-in-law, retinued with quiet swords .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ATTILA   (turning and staring) Hm?
  
  GUNNAR   We acknowledge your hospitality.
  
  ATTILA   Well, well.
  
  Sit down.
  
  I remember she spoke of you.
  
  HEOGNI   (aloud) Toad of toads.
  
  GUNNAR   But as
  for alliance,
  And to ride with your host .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ATTILA   Jukka! Converse with him for
  me.
  
  (turning to Blada, who sits next him) So you'll sweep
  the banners around their loose end, curl it up and cut for the
  center: the plain is wide.
  
  BLADA   Ay, Master.
  
  They'll have reserve, I must have more
  weight than can be delayed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  JUKKA   (to Gunnar) He say he ver' glad you here.
  
  GUNNAR   He seems a laconic man.
  
  Between kings, courtesy
  should be religion.
  
  HOEGNI   Whisper, Gudrun.
  
  How does it feel?
  
  They say the
  Black Forest women have to do wi' wolves, but a toad, my
  God! Have you got warts?
  
  GUDRUN   Do not tempt me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  JUKKA   (to Gurmar) He make plan 'bout .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  big fighting.
  
  Soon he drink more, then make speech to you maybe.
  
  GUDRUN   .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  toward a black duty.
  
  I have what I sought in
  marriage, that's power.
  
  I am not hardened yet
  To its uses.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh Oh, Carling, I wish I had died with him.
  
  There were blue campions around him beside the spring,
  All changed in color, his blood had filled all their cups.
  
  I wish the wet red earth sweet with young flowers
  Had swallowed my life with Sigurd's, for I am not strong enough
  to be his avenger.
  
  (Nothing, Jukka,
  Oh nothing: an old feud of our tribe.
  
  ) Gunnar:
  Look down the table, you see the three boys beyond Blada and Bela-Nor?
  
  They are sons of Attila.
  
  He has no other male relatives, for he
  killed his brothers, it is their custom.
  
  These fresh boys will
  cut each other's throats when the time comes.
  
  You'll leave early to-morrow, I shall arrange it.
  
  Tell Hoegni .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  tell Hoegni his hand .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  was crueller than
  mine.
  
  Carling:
  Stay with me?
  
  CARLING   I long to.
  
  You are good and beautiful, and here
  is the main door of the world.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I am Gunnar's man.
  
  GUDRUN   Because I am lonely and hate myself.
  
  And though this
  camp-life is always dangerous, and has no root
  In nature, nothing but wars, rapine and wandering; this people
  would need ennobling to pass for wolves:
  But Gunnar too and Hoegni are murderers.
  
  If you should ever
  do anything glorious they'd knife you for it.
  
  In the back.
  
  GUNNAR   I am glad you are not an oath-breaker.
  
  You cannot
  have him.
  
  GUDRUN   Can I not?
  
  GUNNAR   You'll go home with us, Carling.
  
  GUDRUN   You make him unhappy and nothing is decided.
  
  Drink,
  brother.
  
  The trumpeter comes in, on the serving-side of the table, drops
  on one knee before Attila, and whispers to Blada.
  
  BLADA   The bishop of Troyes, Master.
  
  One of those Roman
  holy-men.
  
  He came through the lines at Troyes saying he
  had gifts for you, so they brought him here.
  
  What was his
  name?
  
  What?
  
  THE TRUMPETER   Lupus, my lord.
  
  Bishop Lupus.
  
  ATTILA   We lack entertainment since the juggler was brained.
  
  Ah?
  
  Bring him in.
  
  HOEGNI   (to Gudrun) Are you done raging?
  
  What's a juggler?
  
  GUDRUN   (to Carling) The poor man was doing tricks for them.
  
  At first they threw pennies, but when they were drunk they
  threw bones.
  
  Bishop Lupus and his followers are led in, and set to stand facing
  Attila.
  
  The bishop is a tired white-bearded old man, noble in
  distress.
  
  His robe is torn and soiled; he carries a crozier.
  
  ATTILA   Well, old beard?
  
  Talk.
  
  BISHOP LUPUS    I come to plead for a Roman town
  Your troops are troubling; that your majesty may deign to spare
  it for a fit ransom.
  
  I am the unhappy shepherd
  That has to kneel to the wolf.
  
  ATTILA   Your name?
  
  LUPUS   I thought they had
  told you.
  
  I am the unhappy Bishop of Troyes,
  Which lies like an egg in your hand to spare or crush.
  
  ATTILA   (like a play-actor', pretending vast anger)
  Spy! Do you hide your name?
  
  LUPUS   Lupus, my lord.
  
  ATTILA   Lupus.
  
  I thought so.
  
  Unmasked, ah?
  
  This seeming-reverend
  benign old man, that styles himself
  A shepherd: what kind of shepherd?
  
  A stealthy ravening and
  murderous wolf.
  
  I'll pluck that mock-saintly beard,
  See the great fangs grin in the jaws.
  
  LUPUS   It is only my name, my lord,
  I cannot help it.
  
  Your majesty
  Delights in mockery.
  
  GUNNAR   (to Gudruri) What is this ah-ah-ah talk, so smooth and
  soft?
  
  Do you understand it?
  
  GUDRUN   (who has drawn a straight bright dagger from a hidden
  sheath, and plays with it on the table before her, regarding
  it gravely, as if she were reading it like a sad poem, in silence
  but with moving lips)
  Roman.
  
  No.
  
  GUNNAR   I wish I could understand it.
  
  (seeing the dagger) That
  is a nice brave thing, do you cut your meat with it?
  
  GUDRUN   I keep it clean, (turning to her slave-woman) Chrysothemis:
  What are they saying?
  
  (Chrysothemis interprets in her ear from
  time to time, Gudrun does not listen, but reads her knife.
  
  )
  ATTILA   (continuing, to the bishop) Well, then: what ransom?
  
  LUPUS   All that we have in the city, except a few loaves of mercy
  Against starvation.
  
  For if you destroy the hive you'll have the
  honey, my lord, but burnt and damaged.
  
  Much rather take the honey and let the hive live, and season
  after season returning take
  New tribute.
  
  ATTILA   You have a great store of wealth then.
  
  Oh, little,
  my lord.
  
  The Goths have stripped us yearly, and the Alans
  Before them: we can only give all that we have.
  
  ATTILA   All, hm?
  
  That's
  to say, all.
  
  Including your virgins,
  Young wives, all other livestock.
  
  LUPUS   My lord, I have stood humbly
  before you bearing your mockeries.
  
  ATTILA   Very well.
  
  Open your gates to-morrow in the morning, my officers will examine
  your houses.
  
  LUPUS   You are right, Attila,
  To judge me both fool and coward, that I have prayed mercy
  Where no mercy is.
  
  ATTILA   You guess badly again.
  
  I am as full of mercy as the
  comb is of honey.
  
  But unfortunately I have not enough wine
  for all my people, nor beer either.
  
  We must drink the rivers.
  
  LUPUS   I doubt your meaning, my lord.
  
  We will roll out all we
  have, every keg, every jug.
  
  ATTILA   It is not enough.
  
  Your misfortune is that your city is on
  the Seine and pollutes the water.
  
  My horses bloated when we
  passed there.
  
  And now that we move west again: you understand?
  
  For sanitation, for sanitation.
  
  Man, woman, and child:
  every soul that drops excrement.
  
  LUPUS   You are great and cruel, and are pleased to mock at us.
  
  I have borne it humbly.
  
  I have been deceiving you, Attila: you
  are not the mighty one here.
  
  You range the dark world
  From the Danube to the western sea; no man resists you, no
  power confines you; your numbers like the shore sands,
  And deadlier and crueller than the sea waves; so that the tall white
  ignorant heathen that humble Rome
  Horde upon horde fall helpless before you.
  
  They fall and scream at your feet; you ride them like horses or
  you drive them like deer.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Yet I say to you
  That the King whom I serve sometimes weeps in his sleep, pitying
  Attila.
  
  ATTILA   Ho! In the pillow?
  
  Paternoster, ah?
  
  Paternoster.
  
  We know you.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What is that
  hook?
  
  LUPUS   For though you are great on earth,
  And seem to prosper invincibly: alas, there is only one little step
  for a man between life and death,
  Vast pride and bloody destruction.
  
  ATTILA   I step, but not down.
  
  What
  is that hook in your hand?
  
  Answer.
  
  LUPUS   My crozier.
  
  The shepherd
  staff, the sign of my office.
  
  ATTILA   Hm?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Dog!
  Attila glares at him in silence, with a stagy look oj black
  ferocity.
  
  Lupus begins to tremble', but returns the stare 'with
  courage.
  
  GUNNAR   (to Gudruri) What now, what now?
  
  What did he say?
  
  GUDRUN   He is trying to scare the old man.
  
  HOEGNI   Eh: Gudrun.
  
  What d' y' keep reading your knife for?
  
  Has it runes in it?
  
  GUDRUN   This?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I will tell you.
  
  It is clean and straight.
  
  It speaks to me.
  
  It says: "Justice.
  
  Faithfulness.
  
  Honor.
  
  Courage.
  
  Duty.
  
  " .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But I am not able.
  
  I am not just, but a woman with kindred.
  
  Not honorable, not faithful to the eagle I loved.
  
  But passive, corrupt, merciful.
  
  HOEGNI   Do you say so! Sheathe it then.
  
  ATTILA   Hear me, companions.
  
  I have wound this babbler in the
  net of his own words, and he has confessed.
  
  He is the spy of
  a great king (that soaks pillows), and he is sent to hook me
  down with that hook: do you see that hook?
  
  See it jiggle
  in his hand.
  
  Judge.
  
  HUNS AND GOTHS   (some in earnesty others shouting 'with laughter)
  Death.
  
  Flaying.
  
  The blood-eagle.
  
  By his beard hang him.
  
  LUPUS   Lord Christ, I entrust my spirit to thy wounded hands
  Very cheerfully.
  
  Speak to thy Father, Lord,
  For the poor people of my city; and that he have mercy
  Even on Attila.
  
  ATTILA   You tremble, however.
  
  Wait! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Reprieved, old man.
  
  I never offend a God on the eve of battle.
  
  My secretary
  Gratiano will arrange a fair ransom with you before you go
  home: he is a Christian too.
  
  Now .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What's this picture
  on the wall behind me?
  
  Is it your God?
  
  Gratiano thinks so.
  
  The sun is setting, its level rays burn on the painting.
  
  Attilcfs
  imposing shadow, at the feet of the Prometheus, moves as he
  turns.
  
  LUPUS   No.
  
  (He wavers, as if to fall.
  
  )
  1 have tasted death.
  
  I wish to remember that it holds no bitterness;
  But lined with eternal life, solemn with joy.
  
  As for that picture .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The picture, my lord?
  
  ATTILA   Come, come.
  
  LUPUS   (wearily, passing his hand over his forehead)
  A fable of the pagans; we read it in school.
  
  A wise giant that
  loved mankind: the God of the pagans crucified .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I mean
  hanged him for it.
  
  ATTILA   Bah.
  
  I took the ransom because I thought your God was
  here.
  
  Drink, friends, it's a sick world! , .
  
  .
  
  Why was yours hanged?
  
  LUPUS   What did you say, my lord?
  
  ATTILA   Yours too was hanged for loving mankind.
  
  LUPUS   Yes .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  yes.
  
  I am terribly tired.
  
  He gave himself
  willingly.
  
  ATTILA   It is all the same thing.
  
  Keep your feet, old man! If you
  fall your city falls.
  
  (The bishop sways and faints, but is held
  up from falling by the priests with him) Ricimer: why was
  yours hanged?
  
  RICIMER, A GOTH   Who?
  
  Me, master?
  
  ATTILA   When you swear by your hanged God, when you promise
  me faithfulness.
  
  Was he hanged for loving mankind?
  
  RICIMER   Ho! We love our friends, not mankind.
  
  GUNNAR   (to Gudrun reading her dagger) You have sworn,
  Gudrun.
  
  RICIMER   We say that he hanged himself up as a sacrifice to himself.
  
  They hang up heroes and white horses to him but that's
  not enough; he wanted the greatest sacrifice.
  
  There is nothing
  greater than himself, so he hanged himself up.
  
  Or another
  story .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   (suddenly standing) I, my lord! I, my lord!
  ATTILA   Eh?
  
  Go on.
  
  GUDRUN   I was brought up in it.
  
  We think there's a great wisdom
  in pain that's hidden from the happy.
  
  Woden's our God of Gods and no power could hurt him: then
  he must hurt himself to learn it: how else,
  Wisdom's higher half?
  
  It's false, though; I learn nothing.
  
  I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh tell me, my lord, do the dead care
  What the living .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what we do?
  
  ATTILA   Take care of your words; we
  are feasting, not prophesying.
  
  GUDRUN   Or even a punishment
  Is death?
  
  Quick pain and eternal quietness: that's a reward.
  
  Or do
  they lie groaning?
  
  Ignorant, my lord?
  
  But I can't act without knowing! Ask your companions, Attila,
  ask your lords of war, Attila!
  What: have you sent so many thousands to death, and not know
  what death is?
  
  Never frown at me, my lord, I am not drunk,
  Or only on the bitterness.
  
  Because my spirit's been rushing back
  and forth all day and dashing itself
  On both sides of decision like a fish in a doubled net.
  
  I can neither
  do it nor not do it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I'll speak quietly.
  
  ATTILA   (scowling) Do what?
  
  GUDRUN   I will tell you.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I pray you
  to let the old man lie down, my lord.
  
  We are cruel
  In needs and nature, but not to use it for amusement.
  
  That old sick
  innocence.
  
  HOEGNI   (to Carling) Boy: slip away before it explodes.
  
  Gunnar
  and I are hanging on a widow's hair: never fear, we'll take
  some with us: but you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  survive, survive.
  
  Do as if you
  were drunk and must find a place to relieve yourself.
  
  CARLING   You mistake her terribly.
  
  ATTILA   Gudrun: we never allow women to drink with us: I honored
  you because you seemed white and still and well-bred.
  
  I was wrong to make an exception.
  
  You do for the bed but
  not the board.
  
  Keep standing, old man; on your feet! or all's lost.
  
  When it grows dark I'll set a torch-bearer by you
  To light you all night: if you fall we sack Troyes.
  
  I am not to be
  moved by women.
  
  You old white weariness,
  Can you not watch with me for one night?
  
  I too am aging, the snows of time in my hair like winter on the
  black pinewoods that wind that Grecian
  Fire-mountain Aetna: the frightful heart never cools, and when
  the fire bursts forth where is the snow?
  
  But still I am aging, and carry the enormous burden of the world.
  
  Night after hollow night my friends here
  Eat flesh, drink and wax merry, my armies that cover all the plain
  feed by straw fires and sleep, my companions
  Rest in their tents; but for me no slumber, no rest, no relief.
  
  My
  herds of horses
  Lie down under the stars before dawn, the herders forget to herd
  them, all the mounted sentinels
  Nod lower, their heads droop over to the horses' manes.
  
  The
  last drunkard sleeps in his song; the inveterate
  Gamblers dicing for bits of conquest, by a candle hooded with
  double leather, let fall their yellow
  Eyelids, their fingers relax.
  
  Even the little flowers of the fields
  have closed their faces and sleep .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Who watches then?
  
  Who takes care?
  
  Who upholds
  The troublesome and groaning earth, revolving it like a vast iron
  ball in the torrent of his mind, devising
  Its better courses?
  
  Which one of your Caesars?
  
  Or does a Goth
  Uphold the whole earth, night and day, never sleeping?
  
  Is it
  Attila?
  
  And yet your thankless Romans and brutal
  West Goths conspire.
  
  Whom I shall crush with one mangling
  battle, in streams of blood exterminate rebellion
  And settle the world; no man again to make war, no man to be
  masterless, but laboring in orderly peace
  Under my lordship, the peace and happiness of the whole earth.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Hold up your face, man.
  
  If you fall, or fail to attend me, remember: every roof burnt,
  every man slain, each woman and child
  For a sport to the horse-herders.
  
  Eh, old man?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Tell me:
  I, watching all the nights through, toiling all day, sustaining the
  earth: am I not like your God
  That gave himself up to torture to save humanity, because he
  loved them?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Take off your hands from him!
  Let him stand alone.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Eh?
  
  Answer.
  
  LUPUS   Have mercy .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ATTILA   And
  who, except my own people stuffed with incessant spoils,
  Has any gratitude?
  
  You in Troyes, shutting your gates?
  
  The
  Romans, that opened their mouths to swallow the earth
  And have choked on it?
  
  Or Theodoric the Goth, bought with
  Rome's gold?
  
  I shall not leave one alive.
  
  HOEGNI   (to Carling, as Gudrun rises again) Make off, will you.
  
  Warn our folk if you can.
  
  CARLING   She is good.
  
  You are dreaming.
  
  GUDRUN   My lord, you are great and men are ungrateful.
  
  You
  have told your sufferings, our pity is moved.
  
  May I mention
  mine?
  
  I shall make no disturbance; I have found decision and can speak
  quietly.
  
  My prayer is for simple justice,
  And you only in the world have power.
  
  I have stood in your
  favor.
  
  ATTILA   Promotion for your brothers, I suppose.
  
  Let them earn
  it in the near battle, it will taste the sweeter.
  
  GUDRUN   (sighing sharply) Ah.
  
  A kind of promotion.
  
  Yes, my
  lord.
  
  My youngest brother is perfectly without guilt in the matter: he
  must be saved.
  
  And my brother's men
  Are guiltless: I pray you let them go home.
  
  ATTILA   Hm?
  
  Stop there.
  
  Twilight's a bad counsellor.
  
  Bring in the torches.
  
  HOEGNI   (gently) Snow-girl:
  Snow-girl: do you expect to outlive us?
  
  We are not disarmed.
  
  GUNNAR   (out of the corner of his mouth, to Hoegni)
  Hold your hand, brother.
  
  That would
  finish it.
  
  Patience and cunning may find the ford yet.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Gudrun .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  sister .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Torch-bearers have come in.
  
  Some take their places behind
  the top of the table, so that the Prometheus is illuminated, but
  Attila a thick overbearing bulk against the light; others, at
  Attiltfs gesture, stand opposite Gudrun and her brothers, and
  one by Lupus; much of the company is in shadow, but these
  brightly lighted.
  
  GUDRUN  Carling dear, can't you quiet them
  Until I have finished speaking?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You remember, my lord,
  how curiously I inquired (and never an answer!)
  On the subject of death?
  
  But now I think that if it is good I will
  do them good, for I love them.
  
  If evil, evil: for I hate them too.
  
  The thing they did to Sigurd
  I will do to them.
  
  (And quite ready
  To tempt it myself, Hoegni.
  
  Jukka: watch him.
  
  He threatens my life.
  
  )
  Ah but this is a miserable story, my lord, of spites and jealousies
  In a back-woods corner between the swamp and the trees.
  
  In
  winter we have no sun and bleach white, in the spring
  We kill each other; blue campions blossom.
  
  You can hardly
  imagine our heavy narrowness, one thought a year
  And there it sticks.
  
  You plains-riders pass over and look at new things.
  
  I knew an eagle in my youth, but the warrior-woman
  Brynhild had enjoyed him when he was a boy.
  
  She married my brother Gunnar here, still loving Sigurd,
  Who was mine.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Wave the torch-man, my lord, nearer my face
  While I speak of him, because I must praise him
  For Brynhild's reasons.
  
  Myself being wedded to the Hun-king,
  the captain of the earth,
  Would hardly .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  care .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  to remember
  How beautiful (to that bison-boned woman I mean) Sigurd appeared.
  
  Oh, he was tall, and rather
  Pale than ruddy, with golden brown hair and eyes like the .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  He was like a lonely eagle in the van of attack and like an iron
  tower (Brynhild
  Believed) in the closed battle when it bled at his base.
  
  Yet gayer
  at the feast and gender than any girl .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  At least of such as we breed northward .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  She preferred him
  to Gunnar and wooed him secretly and he disdained her.
  
  I too was a little scornful, because the woman was built too big
  and masculine to go about sighing
  With eyes like a sick wood-pigeon's,
  Then Brynhild in a cold and patient fury wrought on her husband,
  my brother here, saying daily
  That Sigurd outbraved him, Sigurd was the better man, Sigurd
  plotted to wrench his kingdom away,
  And so forth, and we in ignorance.
  
  The more noble are the more
  helpless in these whispering wars.
  
  So they killed Sigurd.
  
  Gunnar my brother and my brother Hoegni knifed him from
  behind, while he was kneeling to drink
  At a spring in the forest and you observe, my lord,
  That my face has not twitched nor my tongue faltered; the wrong
  I suffered led me up to the sun
  Of your countenance and burns to a benefit.
  
  ATTILA   Gives you that icicle
  look: Hm?
  
  GUDRUN   The whole world is injured
  If wickedness flowers unpunished.
  
  ATTILA   What do you want?
  
  GUDRUN   The woman, my lord, killed herself.
  
  Here are the men.
  
  I told the story to amuse you.
  
  ATTILA   You have a crooked mind.
  
  If you know what you want
  I will do it.
  
  GUDRUN   That my brother Carling be spared, because he had no
  part in the matter, he was then a young child.
  
  CARLING   Oh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Gudruri*
  GUNNAR   (standing) My lord she has not shown you the half of
  this business.
  
  We are here as your guests and hers .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  HOEGNI   (laying his sword on the table in front of Jukka) Take
  it, toad, (rising 'while Jukka reaches for it) I have its little twin.
  
  He leans across Carling, striking at Gudrun with his dagger;
  but Carling, his right arm engaged under Hoegnfs weight,
  catches the blade of the dagger in his left hand.
  
  Chrysothemis screams.
  
  Jukka and others overpower Hoegm
  from behind.
  
  Gunnar, leaping back and half drawing his
  sword, is overpowered by Timor and others.
  
  ATTILA   (roaring with angry laughter) Ho! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Are you hurt?
  
  GUDRUN   (to Carling) Your hand, your hand!
  CARLING   (his hand raining blood on the table)
  What have you done, Gudrun!
  ATTILA   (angrily shouting) I say are you hurt?
  
  GUDRUN   My .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  No, my lord.
  
  My little brother .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh,
  Chrysothemis, tear your linen and tie it up.
  
  Here, here.
  
  (Gudrun gives her the dagger that she had been playing
  with) Cut strips.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Not hurt, my master.
  
  My brother
  took in his hand the blade .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ATTILA   What kind of death will you choose for them?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Drink, friends, it's no harm.
  
  GUDRUN   I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (moaning over Carling's
  hand) Does it hurt?
  
  Oo, Ooh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I am so awakened
  From such a dream .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I was not the one
  That wanted them, that wanted .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh no, my lord; and I do
  pray you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ATTILA   By God, again?
  
  GUDRUN   As in a nightmare
  We do what day would damn us for,
  I have been wanting .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What have I done!
  My brothers, my lord: I grew up wi* them.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  As if I had walked in the narrow cave of a dream and could never turn,
  But now have wakened.
  
  No, no, no.
  
  If he struck at me,
  He knew that I was mad and trying for his life.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh, truly my lord
  It was only a play of mine to amuse you.
  
  I have sisterly grudges,
  I sought to frighten them.
  
  ATTILA   Ay?
  
  We've drunk too much
  For you to jest with.
  
  GUDRUN   It went too far.
  
  Yes, my lord.
  
  ATTILA   Well, Timor?
  
  Ah?
  
  Whatever she wants,
  They have brawled at our table.
  
  Take them out, do what my law
  requires.
  
  Leave the pale boy.
  
  HOEGNI   Damn you, Carling, that saved the toad's slut! But there,
  boy.
  
  Take heart.
  
  Live merrily.
  
  JUKKA   (to Hoegni) Come on, you.
  
  Your last walk.
  
  TIMOR   (to Gunnar) Come.
  
  GUDRUN   (who has been standing death-white and passive, with
  eyes staring at no mark) I am in such a hell .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUNNAR  Nobles of the Goths: is this justly done?
  
  You princely
  East Goths and Franks .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It was sworn to me by Woden hanged on the tree, by the agony
  of God .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (A hand is clapped on his mouth.
  
  )
  ATTILA   (sharply, to Lupus) Keep on your feet, Bishop the
  beard.
  
  GUDRUN   (to Chrysothemis) Give me that! (She takes the dagger
  and sets the point against her breast) Attila, my master! If
  anyone comes near me before I speak .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  or if they are
  taken off before you have heard me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I know not that
  you care, but I'll do this.
  
  ATTILA   Fool.
  
  GUDRUN   Perfectly, my lord.
  
  That is my name.
  
  One who swore
  vengeance by the great self-tortured God
  I then believed in; and consecrated my helpless life to it, went
  spying through the world for power to accomplish it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (Her eyes rove continually, watching against interference)
  Tell your servants to stand away from me, my lord,
  Or in goes the needle-point.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I heard that the power in the
  world was Attila: I knew not then that I was to love you,
  But solely playing my life to kill Sigurd's murderers .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  That
  was my constant passion, whether we rode
  In Greece or pleasured in Persia, or on the mirage-
  Glimmering Hungarian plain.
  
  At length we campaign in Gaul;
  I laid the trap when we crossed the Rhine,
  And sprung it by the Marne, and I cannot bear it.
  
  I seem contemptible to Sigurd but let him lie.
  
  Let them go!
  Oh, Oh, quietly.
  
  I promise.
  
  For two reasons, my lord: for if I have accomplished my brothers'
  destruction it will seem to all men that I love Sigurd dead
  more than you living.
  
  And also I shall kill myself.
  
  ATTILA   These are dreams from the wine-cup bottoms.
  
  You have
  drunk yourself mad.
  
  GUDRUN   Forgive me, Carling.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Hands off!
  RICIMER THE GOTH   Master.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  For undoubtedly they are
  guests; and it seems a crooked occasion.
  
  Might it be well to
  wait judgment until the morning?
  
  Two messengers have come in.
  
  They are dressed for the field,
  capped 'with iron and stained 'with riding.
  
  The gaudily dressed
  trumpeter is with them, trying to prevent them.
  
  THE TRUMPETER   No, no, no, let me announce you.
  
  ONE OF THE MESSENGERS  It is haste.
  
  GUDRUN   Oh noble Ricimer! Pray to my master!
  The messengers stand beside Bishop Lupus and his companions.
  
  ATTILA  What.
  
  You're well splashed.
  
  You, Haiga?
  
  HAIGA   Master.
  
  They have made forced marches and have forded
  the Seine at five miles from Troyes.
  
  Your servants there are
  vigilant.
  
  ATTILA   It is time.
  
  HAIGA   I have ordered raids, we shall have a few captives for
  questioning.
  
  The horses are being brought in.
  
  ATTILA   This is not courage.
  
  These wretches rush on their fate
  like trembling culprits
  That pray the executioner to hurry the stroke.
  
  Dear hearts! it's
  ready.
  
  I shall so hug you, Theodoric,
  And you, Roman Aetius .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (to Haiga) You will tell me the
  rest after we clear the hall.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Out, you unneeded.
  
  For the
  forest-men: take them and tie them up and set a guard: your
  business, Jukka.
  
  Except that pale boy: treat him with honor.
  
  Set a strong watch on their people.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  For this old whitemuzzled
  sheep-dog .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  go pray, totter-knees.
  
  Give him a
  tent.
  
  Out with you.
  
  (As they go out) Close the curtains, we
  take counsel.
  
  V
  GUDRUN   (standing this side of the closing curtains; 'with Chrysothemis.
  
  Carling has left her, going
  Do you see him forget me, that pale bright thankless boy?
  
  Yet
  his blood's
  What washed my courage away and made me a merciful .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  piece for contempt.
  
  We are all four
  That bright foul blood.
  
  That foul bright .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Am I insane or what?
  
  Look how Attila lights for action like a
  joy-fire, how Hoegni flamed up for it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (tearing at herself)
  Oh! Wet punk.
  
  You were born a Roman.
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   I?
  
  Yes, my lady, a Greek.
  
  GUDRUN   Men stole from your parents when you were ten years old.
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   Yes.
  
  GUDRUN   You were beaten without mercy, raped and starved and
  sold to a trader, and so began your pilgrimage.
  
  If your robbe?
  
  s were laid at your feet, what would you do?
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   Alas, my lady.
  
  Nothing.
  
  GUDRUN   How, nothing?
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   I would let them go.
  
  We were taught to forgive
  evil and love our enemies.
  
  But also I have known too much
  suffering ever to wish to inflict it, even on the wickedest .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   (striking her) Coward.
  
  Slave.
  
  A slave by nature.
  
  (They go out.
  
  )
  VI
  The scene is empty and darkened.
  
  Again and again horses are
  heard galloping from a sudden start: Attila's messengers to the
  four quarters of the field.
  
  The curtains are darkened out of sight,
  so that the person 'who comes in seems to walk abstract and aloney
  on a great plain at night.
  
  He sleeps the plain 'with a broom.
  
  THE SWEEPER
  I am sweeping the Catalaunian plain,
  Seine to Marne, Marne to Seine.
  
  Back and forth, south and north,
  For another battle this old earth.
  
  North and south,
  Blood of your sons will fill your mouth.
  
  West and east,
  Warrior's fall is worm's feast.
  
  East and west,
  Who can say but death's best?
  
  Here a track for the Hun stallions,
  Here a stand for Goth battalions,
  I must make all smooth and plain
  Along the Catalaunian plain.
  
  Here the legions, here for a king .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  To fall .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  here for a king .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I forget the rhyme, I cannot help it.
  
  At every new era we have to
  learn a new set of verses, but damn this tinkle-tankle.
  
  God curse all rhymes
  I have to learn because of changing times.
  
  Fair, ah?
  
  I made it out of my head.
  
  Times change and we have to
  tag along,
  Learn a new song.
  
  I am the wind, I am the rain
  Over Chalons and along the plain,
  The tortured grass to grow again .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Wi' poppies in it too.
  
  The stars shine weakly .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Stop.
  
  What
  are you?
  
  (Two heroic shadows pass in the air.
  
  )
  ONE OF THE SHADOWS
  Weep for the living, Brynhild, not for us dead.
  
  We cannot be betrayed nor betray ourselves;
  We have power, though unwilled; and only shadows of pain.
  
  (They fade and pass.
  
  )
  THE SWEEPER   (shivering) Booh!
  I am the wind, I am the rain,
  Sweep the Catalaunian plain,
  The dead they flit, the living remain,
  Lives like grass and blood like water,
  The women will breed and it's no matter.
  
  (He goes out, sweeping.
  
  )
  VII
  Starlight.
  
  A few distant red campfires.
  
  CARLING   (entering alone) What was that?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Nothing.
  
  But
  their guards never sleep.
  
  Gunnar and Hoegni are held in a
  pit under a wall, bound hand and foot, and I am not allowed
  to come near them.
  
  I will glide through the army and rouse
  our people.
  
  We'll show these brown men whether the western
  axe has an edge, whether Gunnar is a king or a servile Goth.
  
  We are few, but the many sleep.
  
  What does it say in the poem?
  
  Let only a few but resolute arise,
  The tyrannies of darkness are not invincible.
  
  The soul of man is
  greater than the winter giants.
  
  Ah sweet sword,
  Sea-eagle how you vibrate against my thigh.
  
  We never guessed
  that so soon .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah?
  
  We are going to act
  A nobler poem than any sung one: if I shake it's with eagerness.
  
  That red torch Antares
  Stands high in the south of summer midnight and we shall hew
  out of here before dawn.
  
  Now.
  
  Quietly.
  
  (He goes out.
  
  )
  VIII
  Interior of a tent, lighted by a small lamp.
  
  Darkness outside.
  
  Chrysothemis lies asleep in a corner of the tent.
  
  GUDRUN   A slave's dream, but a sweet one,
  That love is her law and God.
  
  She has slept on it, with a little
  breath of a Roman prayer, her hand
  Under her cheek.
  
  "Snow-girl," he called me, the pet-name, even
  in his hissing anger.
  
  And poor Gunnar's
  Pitiful bewildered kingliness.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Yes?
  
  Was not Sigurd
  Pitiable too?
  
  No, never, in his life or death.
  
  Betrayed, then?
  
  Betrayed
  and stabbed, cowardly and shamefully.
  
  I have given my life and lived with a loathed husband, made
  myself the Hun's flattering harlot, to avenge it.
  
  Lived in the filth of the camp, lain in the sweat of his bed, my
  cold white body accepting entrances
  It ought to have died not to endure.
  
  No wonder my mind's
  divided in two: how can I tell
  Which half's the real one?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It's because I've lost religion;
  travel and the Christians corrupt me.
  
  I see the armies
  Like worms crawling, and the Gods a cloudy growth of deception,
  and laws and justice only habitual
  Fear and imposed violence.
  
  I'll kill the half of my mind and not
  change again: how they'll laugh at me
  When safe at home.
  
  But Oh, the futile proceedings of life henceforward,
  its purpose gone, disgraced
  And beggared, sold for nothing, empty and vile.
  
  Empty and vile.
  
  Yes, but
  Lordly Sigurd is nothing either; Sigurd is ashes.
  
  What value in
  ashes?
  
  that desire nothing,
  And are not desired; no courage in ashes, no joy, no loveliness, no
  eyes, no song.
  
  Am I to have killed
  My brothers for the sake of a cup of ashes?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Yes, but if
  Sigurd and the wish to serve him die out of me,
  Then Sigurd is dead indeed.
  
  Oh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (staring) I am in such a
  hell of emptiness .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I will not change.
  
  I have forgiven them.
  
  Wake up, will you.
  
  (shaking Chrysothemis by the shoulder) Up!
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   Ah, no, my
  lady, I am sure
  It can't be lost.
  
  I laid it in the cinnamon-wood casket
  With the other silver.
  
  GUDRUN   You must get up.
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   Yes, my lady.
  
  GUDRUN  They took my brothers to that cellar-hole
  Under the broken wall by the linden tree, near Blada's encampment.
  
  You'll bear them a message for me.
  
  Tell them I pledge my life for theirs and will see them safe.
  
  Tell
  them that, as you say so grandly,
  "Love has conquered.
  
  " I have the will and the power.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But
  after that.
  
  After that, woe to me harborless,
  Without direction or virtue.
  
  Well.
  
  Go.
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   How long I have prayed
  to die.
  
  Oh not at night, my lady,
  Through the fierce camp!
  GUDRUN   Poor doll, what do you fear, you were deflowered
  twenty years ago.
  
  No one will touch you, you are known
  for mine.
  
  And you are old, you are old.
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   (kneeling) I dare not.
  
  I cannot, though you kill
  me.
  
  They are horrible.
  
  GUDRUN   You are not wise, my dear.
  
  There is a worse wolf here
  than in the hundred thousand.
  
  I have tied up his jaws as well
  as I can, but speak softly.
  
  Chrysothemis goes, but stops outside the tent, in the light
  from the tent-flap, wringing her hands.
  
  GUDRUN   Assure them they're safe, and will soon be free.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Little Christ-God of hers: apparently you are the last of
  the Gods for Gudrun, who has sloughed them all.
  
  You'll
  never go far in the world: I wish you could.
  
  A few women,
  a few slaves; but the nature of things is a wolf and your throat
  in his.
  
  A woman and the Roman slaves.
  
  I was a little more than a woman,
  and not a slave, though put to it
  To do craftily, when I made the plan and brought it perfect.
  
  I
  have played the slave's part until it fits;
  Ah?
  
  Slaved myself to the Hun and sold away my body's and
  spirit's nobility for an exact
  Payment of nothing, what a bargain.
  
  I have been bewildered.
  
  This is the curse of having been childless;
  the unspent milk swims in my blood,
  Honor, action, fierce faithfulness cannot live in me; but female,
  female mercy, female compunctions,
  And be inferior forever.
  
  You! Chryso!
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   ('wringing her hands) I stand between death and
  death.
  
  GUDRUN   She's gone: I forgot.
  
  No matter.
  
  This other message is mine to carry, on my knife's point.
  
  She goes through the tent-flap and comes on Chrysothemis,
  'who drops to her knees.
  
  GUDRUN   (coldly) Baby.
  
  Get up and follow.
  
  (Noise of horses
  galloping) Wait while the horsemen pass: Attila's messagebirds
  That fly all night when killing's in the air.
  
  He is filthy to touch
  or smell but a man of war.
  
  I
  Could respect him.
  
  Come .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah?
  
  Thafs something.
  
  (Distant shoutings and anger in the darkness.
  
  Clash of arms, as of
  an enemy raid driven into the encampment.
  
  ) Have they
  pulled open the iron flower of battle
  Untimely under weak stars?
  
  Listen (A stampede of horses is heard.
  
  Men calling from all directions.
  
  The central anger seems moving
  distantly, from left to right) it's pretty.
  
  Shine, killers.
  
  What! Will your Christians
  Fight?
  
  It makes Tyr and Woden itch in my blood, all the unbelieved
  absurdities like thirsty fleas.
  
  Wonderful, to feel one's mind for a moment unfixed from misery.
  
  Baby, come.
  
  I want to see it.
  
  (draining Chrysothemis by the wrist) Come I say.
  
  Gudruris tent-sentinel has been standing motionless in the
  darkness.
  
  He comes into the light that shines from the tentdoor.
  
  SENTINEL   Regret, my lady, it is not fitting that our lord's lady .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   Quiet, you.
  
  Guard my gear, (shuddering) What was that?
  
  SENTINEL   .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  wander through the night camp .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  My lady?
  
  GUDRUN   Blind I have been.
  
  I never thought of it, mixed in my
  misery.
  
  My own folk's death-shout.
  
  My own blood spilling
  Made me merry just now.
  
  I drove 'em to it: Carling has called
  their troop and I am the fool.
  
  SENTINEL   My lady .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   Follow down then.
  
  (They go into the darkness.
  
  )
  Men are heard roundabout, moving in the darkness, calling to
  each other.
  
  Which way?
  
  I said the bridle.
  
  Is it you, Katta?
  
  A VOICE   (farther bouck) Nothing: some riotous captives.
  
  They
  are being dealt with.
  
  A VOICE   Go back to your places and lie down.
  
  A VOICE   Help me turn the horses if you are mounted, Katta.
  
  This
  is no storm.
  
  IX
  A length of broken wall.
  
  There are many dead at the wall-foot.
  
  A
  campfire flickers to one side; toward the center, warriors of the
  Huns, and men with torches.
  
  Others are investigating the fallen.
  
  Blada enters.
  
  A HUNNISH CAPTAIN   My lord Blada! They brought it on themselves,
  we only quelled them.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The Chief will understand.
  
  BLADA   I hope so.
  
  You are responsible.
  
  You must understand that
  this was the clan of the Lady Gudrun.
  
  THE CAPTAIN   They started up suddenly and attacked.
  
  BLADA   Have you questioned your prisoners?
  
  And there are live
  men in the heap, I can hear them gasping.
  
  THE CAPTAIN   I have sent for a Prankish man who can gather
  their language.
  
  Here he comes I think.
  
  Merovech?
  
  Come
  here.
  
  A HUN SOLDIER   (lifting up Corling from among the slain)
  Here is one living, an arrow right through him.
  
  And still grips a
  broken sword-hilt.
  
  ANOTHER SOLDIER   Oh! That youth was their leader.
  
  BLADA   Question him, Frank.
  
  What were they attempting?
  
  MEROVECH   Were you their leader, young man?
  
  What is your name?
  
  CARLING   (painfully) A free .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  fool.
  
  Whoever you are, you
  had better be lying here .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  than serve the Hun.
  
  MEROVECH   Come, come, your name.
  
  CARLING   Nobler than yours.
  
  MEROVECH   (to Blada) I cannot do well with him: his mind
  wanders.
  
  ANOTHER SOLDIER   (turning over a wounded man)
  Ho! Here is one of the two that were bound in the cellar-pit,
  whom they set free.
  
  BLADA   (to Merovech) Try that one.
  
  Quick: he is going out.
  
  MEROVECH   (kneeling over the wounded) Were you a chief of
  theirs?
  
  Your name, your name.
  
  HOEGNI   (whispering) Go to hell.
  
  MEROVECH   I wish to be your friend.
  
  You have death in your
  belly.
  
  HOEGNI   (whispering) I will tell my name .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  to your master
  the Hun but not to you.
  
  MEROVECH   (to Blada) He says he will tell you his name, but not
  to me.
  
  Blada stoops close to hear him.
  
  Hoegni strikes a dagger into
  his skull and shouts:
  Hoegni! Do you like it?
  
  MEROVECH   God!
  THE CAPTAIN   Ah .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  rat .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (driving the lance he carries
  through Hoegnfs body)
  MEROVECH   You need not have troubled: both dead already, both dead.
  
  THE CAPTAIN   Oh noble Blada.
  
  He can't have died thus: help me!
  MEROVECH   He can't have lived very well, the long blade in his
  brain and the hilt his horn.
  
  My God, a one-horn, a unicorn.
  
  THE CAPTAIN   Oh tent-pole of battles we shall miss you tomorrow.
  
  Oh star of the horses.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  God, God, it's not possible.
  
  (To a
  soldier) Report this to Lord Timor .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  no, no, to Jukka
  first.
  
  Oh dreadful accident! Straighten his body, draw out the dagger.
  
  A SOLDIER   How the dead forest-man grins in his yellow axe of a beard.
  
  Gudrun comes, 'with her tent-sentinel and Chrysothemis.
  
  GUDRUN   I know what has happened.
  
  Are any living?
  
  THE CAPTAIN   The noble Blada! Murdered, murdered.
  
  MEROVECH   My lady!
  GUDRUN   (quietly) I see.
  
  I have come to ask about my brothers: have you killed them all?
  
  I bear the blame: but for pity .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I am slack and patient you know, I can bear anything and smile
  at it, so answer me.
  
  Two of them were
  Captive, one a brave boy.
  
  (She sees Hoegnfs body) Oh.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It
  was cruel.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Is anyone alive?
  
  THE CAPTAIN   My lady: a dreadful accident.
  
  The noble Blada .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   I see.
  
  Where's Ca .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  King Gunnar?
  
  Were any taken Alive?
  
  MEROVECH   I have come just now.
  
  There's a fair boy still breathing
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  If you look carefully
  You'll see twin flecks of light in the heap: he's down but his head's
  lifted: his eyes in the torchlight .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  strange, eh?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Fixed on us.
  
  CARLING   Gudrun: come here.
  
  But do not touch me for the
  pain .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I never guessed: nobody speaks
  About the pain .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   (moaning above him) Oh, Oh.
  
  CARLING   I roused our men, hoping
  to save my brothers.
  
  You and I between us
  Ha' done it, we've done it.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I dreamed of being a poet and a
  warrior and am a piece of skewered meat.
  
  The sword
  You gave me snapped, it was rotten with enamellings.
  
  I hate you,
  but not for that.
  
  Look along by the wall-foot,
  Gunnar like a dead lion.
  
  GUDRUN   Oh his mouth bleeds and fills: beasts! help
  me will you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  CARLING   (painfully) Drown yourself, Gudrun.
  
  Save pain.
  
  GUDRUN   Die, dear .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  dear .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  dear .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Quietly; like sleeping.
  
  Poor wet forehead.
  
  Oh, never?
  
  Oh
  how you shudder.
  
  Again?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Again?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The last, (rising) Now
  Blood-men be quiet.
  
  One beautiful and innocent, worth all your Horde
  And smoky victories, has died, (seeming to weep) Oh.
  
  Oh.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I am false to the bones: I feel nothing: only weariness
  And sticky fingers.
  
  MEROVECH   My God! the Chief!
  A stir among the soldiers.
  
  Attila enters, with Jukka and
  others.
  
  ATTILA   Where?
  
  (seeing Blades body and Gudrun standing near,
  it) To your tent.
  
  A man has died.
  
  GUDRUN   Many have, my lord: from time to time.
  
  ATTILA   (to the captain) Are you of Blada's men?
  
  THE CAPTAIN   Oh, master.
  
  Timor's.
  
  ATTILA   (to a soldier) You?
  
  THE SOLDIER   Truly.
  
  ATTILA   Can you follow Bela-Nor as boldly?
  
  Your master would
  have led the encircling charge to-morrow, the hook that
  brings home the battle: he was my right hand and is cut off:
  Bela-Nor must lead it.
  
  You and your comrades will know
  that he is in Blada's place, it is Blada's soul in him.
  
  You will
  know.
  
  Your leader is not dead, his soul has gone into Bela-
  Nor.
  
  Do you hear, Blada's men?
  
  SOLDIER   Ay! Master.
  
  Bela-Nor!
  ATTILA   For these rioters: if any lives, kill, (to Gudruri) And
  you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  T’ your tent!
  GUDRUN   Well, I bear the whole blame.
  
  I have managed neither
  justice nor mercy; slacked and let happen.
  
  I am one of those cowards that let go the bridle and brutal chance
  rule all.
  
  I ought to be whipped to death.
  
  But who's to do it, Attila?
  
  You?
  
  ATTILA   Are you mad?
  
  GUDRUN   No.
  
  Slacking
  again.
  
  Look, I pray you: this one's
  The best corpse of them all, his hand still bandaged from saving
  my precious life, his brave sword snapped.
  
  A lovely boy but not formed for war.
  
  He had beautiful music
  in his breast, and if he had lived might possibly .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ha' charmed cockroaches.
  
  And take care of my poor little slave-woman: be kind, be kind.
  
  I've lived wi' masterly killers,
  Taking instruction.
  
  (Her knife-blade winks in the torch-light.
  
  )
  ATTILA   Catch her hand!
  GUDRUN   Do this to the Romans tomorrow.
  
  She has carefully placed the point on her breast, and drives it
  in convulsively with both hands, a gesture of straining embrace,
  and falls.
  
  The bystanders cry out.
  
  Chrysotbentis
  kneels by her.
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   Oh.
  
  Dearest - , ,
  JUKKA,   (stooping by the body) Master.
  
  ATTILA   It is deep?
  
  JUKKA   To the bottom.
  
  It is finished.
  
  ATTILA   (furiously) Stand away from her then! .
  
  .
  
  Ah the
  white beast.
  
  What ailed her in God's name?
  
  She wanted her brothers killed
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  wanted, not wanted, gets what she wanted,
  And drinks a knife.
  
  It makes me mad, Jukka: I liked her well.
  
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   Dear Savior, care for her spirit.
  
  She was bewildered, and she was kind.
  
  She might have come to thee.
  
  ATTILA   All these long white women have devils.
  
  Pah-the eve of battle-the same spiteful hour
  My right-hand friend and my favorite too.
  
  A cursed omen.
  
  He stands, blackly brooding.
  
  Meanwhile a thin, fractional, insubstantial Gudrun disengages
  herself from the body of Gudrun and stands beside it, among
  the living but neither seen by them nor seeing them, and
  stares with wide empty eyes.
  
  ATTILA   (to Gudruris tent-sentinel') Why did you not catch her
  hand?
  
  Whose man are you?
  
  THE SOLDIER   (in terror) My lord my lord.
  
  I was not near
  enough.
  
  Timor's.
  
  ATTILA   He can spare you.
  
  (to the Captain) Have him bound:
  and bind the slave-woman.
  
  Bury them living in the Lady
  Gudrun's grave, not to lack attendance,
  CHRYSOTHEMIS   (moaning) Oh.
  
  Oh.
  
  (But neither she nor the
  soldier offers resistance.
  
  )
  ATTILA   For high-born Blada whom I loved: bury him not until
  after the battle.
  
  There will be thousands of Goths for him,
  thousands of Romans.
  
  GUDRUN'S SHADOW   (with vague monotonous voice delirious after
  the shock of death)
  I know not moon nor stars,
  How low you lie, lynx.
  
  You must 'a' bled in the wars.
  
  Edgyth to whom he drinks,
  Or Fredegond:
  Me to womb he thinks .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  JUKKA   (to Attila) May I speak?
  
  .
  
  , .
  
  Shall we convey the bodies
  to their tents, master?
  
  ATTILA   Do it.
  
  Their tents?
  
  Yes, do it.
  
  JUKKA   I'll have beds brought to carry them.
  
  (To a soldier) You,
  Elvi.
  
  And you.
  
  You.
  
  From Blada's quarters: hide stretched on
  spears, or what you can find, but hastily.
  
  GUDRUN'S SHADOW   Tall sit the wolves around
  The lynx in the snow,
  Hanging their tongues beyond
  Their tails I know, (calling) Chrysothemis! (quietly) No, no.
  
  I know.
  
  In a row around the red pool
  In the snow, (calling) Sigurd?
  
  (quietly) Snow, no.
  
  ATTILA   (over Gudrurfs body) She looks less than tall now.
  
  Lying wantonly with what a craving mouth.
  
  I ought to have .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what she asked for .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  whipped to death .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN'S SHADOW   (which has already moved to some distance
  from the body)
  Oh when my (mother's) maiden lynx
  Bled on the spear in the snow, (calling) Father?
  
  (quietly) No:
  snow.
  
  Folded close will my petals open
  When the tenth moon has broken
  Silence?
  
  (calling) Mother?
  
  (quietly) No snow either.
  
  I am in the whom alone.
  
  ATTILA   (touching with his fingers the face and throat of the
  body) I ought to 'a' killed you when you came riding that
  first time.
  
  You were damned from the first.
  
  Farewell,
  Harlot-gold hair.
  
  He withdraws from the body and turns his back on it, while
  men come in with stretchers.
  
  GUDRUN'S SHADOW   My darkness begins to crawl.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Lynx are
  you there?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I begin to remember a loathsome thing
  That the living call life.
  
  (She stands staring.
  
  )
  ATTILA   (to Jukka) D' y' think it'll dawn clear?
  
  JUKKA Master?
  
  Oh, ay, I think so.
  
  There were low clouds but
  the moon outsoars them.
  
  I think we shall have perfect
  weather, my lord.
  
  ATTILA   We had better, (fiercely) Attend to that business: see it
  done with dignity.
  
  GUDRUN'S SHADOW   Am I to go down the darkness eternally
  Chewing such a filthy cud of memories between my eyelids?
  
  Poor youth-broken Carling whimpering
  In the dead men's haycock .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and Hoegni the poison-white
  sidelong slayer .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the plain careful fool
  Gunnar making a speech.
  
  Or a horrible beater of drums like
  Attila.
  
  Or myself, whored and treacherous
  Plotter too weak to see it through, (tearing at herself) Shadow
  cannot hurt shadow,
  No knife can save me.
  
  The bodies are being borne away, accompanied by torchbearers:
  and with Gudrun's, Chrysothemis and the tent-sentinel
  are led.
  
  Chrysothemis screams suddenly, and Attila
  turns.
  
  JUKKA   Stop that.
  
  Strike her mouth.
  
  She is silenced; the bodies are taken out.
  
  Attila shudders and
  draws his cloak to his face.
  
  THE CAPTAIN   (to Jukka, quietly) The Chief .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  look.
  
  JUKKA Oh master.
  
  If I dare: what is it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ATTILA (making a noise like anger) There was none like Gudrun
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Blada.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Things are not right here, do you feel that?
  
  There is no tension in the air.
  
  Always before a battle we've lain
  Twitching in the stored womb of thunder, where the hair starts
  from the skin, men ha' snapped at each other
  Like famished hounds, horses neighed all night.
  
  Now: by God,
  listen.
  
  Not a fierce note in the camp.
  
  GUDRUN'S SHADOW   Ah, but
  My eagle.
  
  Conquering Sigurd, for whose dead sake .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I suppose
  there is no meeting among the dead;
  But each in his lonely darkness, after the drunken insanity and
  sweat of life, remembers disgust.
  
  ATTILA   Nothing.
  
  Murmurs.
  
  Sleepy patience, walking horses,
  stinking omens.
  
  JUKKA   Master, we have Attila.
  
  ATTILA   Oh, ay, we'll cook them and eat them.
  
  Come.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Aetius and his Romans: Theodoric his West Goths and so
  forth: when I gather them in my mind, then they are under
  my hand.
  
  I am still Attila.
  
  (Attila and Jukka go out 'with their
  following.
  
  )
  GUDRUN'S SHADOW   ('while soldiers heap the fire, and hold torches
  to strip the better-furnished of the slain)
  For my killed eagle.
  
  Love, the base instinct, the leader of captivities.
  
  How low you lie, lynx, I've sweated pleasure
  Under Attila's brown bag of a body when I thought of his power.
  
  Love?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I think my deformity
  Was only ambition: to fly at the highest.
  
  Therefore I valued Sigurd, famous for killing, but horrible Attila's
  ten thousand to him.
  
  Oh, vile
  Vile heroic flesh.
  
  Brynhild have him
  If any residue's to find, I know he hankered.
  
  Worthy of each
  other, both heroes, dog-wolf and bitch-wolf.
  
  But I will give myself to the earth-hating wind, in hope to be
  washed clean of the stains and scalding
  And that crime of being born; and praying to find the black
  honey of annihilation in some comb of darkness
  Back of the stars.
  
  At worst I shall find no deeper defilements nor
  no worse captivities.
  
  Fling me far, wind.
  
  (She goes out.
  
  )
  X
  The Sweeper, as in VI, passes along the closed curtain, carrying
  his broom.
  
  He seems inhumanly remote and tall, in spite of the
  bonhomie of his mask.
  
  THE SWEEPER   A fair field, as they say, well swept.
  
  I’ve labored all night and seen the yellow lions of day
  Creep on the Argonne hills peering for prey.
  
  Plenty: they're breaking each other's bones already.
  
  Go it, Goth.
  
  Sick 'em, Hun.
  
  Now I can take a few hours off and back to
  work in the afternoon, for
  Hun brag and hound bay,
  This broom decides the day.
  
  Roman hold and Hun ride,
  My broom will decide.
  
  Strictly according to orders: I'll recite them for you.
  
  First: to
  blow Attila back to the Danube.
  
  Second: to clear the air of
  the cluttering ghosts of the slain.
  
  Third: to pat down the
  battle-corpses and gloss over everything.
  
  So much anger, so much toil,
  All to make soil.
  
  So much fury to feed grass
  Comes to pass.
  
  All the horror, all the pain .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What's horror and pain?
  
  If I could understand the words I might
  remember the rhyme, (scratching his head) .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Well, but
  Some day cabbages and vineyards
  Will spring out of the warriors' inwards.
  
  (He goes out, absent-mindedly sweeping.
  
  )
  XI
  Gudrun, at first alone.
  
  The factors of the scene do not become
  visible until she perceives them.
  
  GUDRUN   Thin storm, no farther?
  
  The air hisses and fails, dying
  like a sick snake.
  
  Far down below me the meteors
  Spin green fire-threads; almost infinitely far down, the glaciers
  make faint light at the mountain-foot.
  
  The peak is hidden in that cloud of stars.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah, it's not here,
  What I was hoping.
  
  My knife was a fool and could only thread
  the meat of the breast, missed this unlucky
  Point it was sent to find .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  spirit, soul .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  me apparently .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the dead body's lost dog,
  Howls in the silence.
  
  Will it starve at last?
  
  Or is it perhaps .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Immortal?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  that would be a sick thing.
  
  I thought this height
  had no human stain: but someone .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The star-vapor
  Drifts off and clears him.
  
  Another of death's white lies I suppose.
  
  (A figure becomes visible, standing on a rock a little higher
  than Gudrun) Red stars in his hands and feet, a blood-comet
  Cut in his side.
  
  He is berserk-naked, young and gray-haired, one
  of the shieldless that burn young.
  
  He seems to be praying to the peak, as our childish priests used to
  pray to oak trees .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and other handless Gods .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (addressing
  the young man)
  And get the same answer.
  
  What are you praying for, annihilation?
  
  If you find it, tell me.
  
  THE YOUNG MAN   Did you believe in me once, that you rub salt
  in my wound?
  
  GUDRUN   What?
  
  No.
  
  If you are the Roman God that my slave
  described to me: how bleak your heaven is.
  
  THE YOUNG MAN   I was deceived; and love is a fire; I cannot end
  until my banked longing burns itself out.
  
  SINGERS   (coming tip from below, and going about the rock the
  young man stands on)
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  No angel flew
  To unwind us when the flesh died,
  No light no song for a guide,
  I cannot guess how we knew
  The way up to you.
  
  I died in childbirth crying to you.
  
  I died of old age in your faith.
  
  I of a crueller death.
  
  All my life was my flying to you.
  
  We on the spear and sword,
  Fighting for Christian Rome.
  
  The running pestilence, Lord.
  
  Open the enchanted home,
  Open the glory of God.
  
  Savior, I on the road
  Running to your wars.
  
  Open the joy, break back the stars.
  
  Because my faith
  Haughtily trampled on death.
  
  The wings, the victory, the shrill
  Song on the height.
  
  The violent blossoming, the life the light
  After the mortal strife.
  
  He will tell us the gate is open: be still.
  
  The star-gates.
  
  Endless life.
  
  THE YOUNG MAN   When I could not bear it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Betrayed children,
  I was deceived before I deceived you.
  
  I have stood here long
  And seen my betrayed come to my feet, and bitterly seen the soul
  more mortal than flesh, and found
  No blood to weep for it.
  
  When the earlier dead came crying to
  me, my first martyrs, from jails and gibbets,
  Who had endured all evil for my sake, led by my words to
  misery, my promises to death by torture:
  And even my own dear friends whom I had touched with my
  hands .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  when I could not bear it,
  I lied and said "Life is here.
  
  Wait but a little, my Father is preparing
  your places behind the stars.
  
  "
  They waited in hope, soon they were nothing.
  
  They faded and
  wasted and were gone away, but not into joy.
  
  I will not lie to you.
  
  You are dead; your lives are finished; there
  is nothing more.
  
  The spirit is a distant echo
  From the other mountain, dying in a moment.
  
  Or a blown fading
  smoke of burnt grass.
  
  My dream was a fool.
  
  My promises were a love-drunken madness.
  
  Alas that you are too
  weary shadows to cry out and curse me
  And drown my long self-torment in your seas of bitterness.
  
  If
  Judas for a single betrayal hanged himself,
  What for me, that betrayed the world?
  
  SINGERS   Our Saviour says
  Wait, for the star-gates move;
  While I gaze on his face,
  While I faint on his love.
  
  THE YOUNG MAN   You have not understood me.
  
  I would not deceive
  any soul
  Again forever.
  
  While I lived I saw my people beaten and deprived,
  therefore I imagined a world
  Beyond life, out of time, righteousness triumphing.
  
  I saw it so
  clearly, towers of light, domes of music,
  God's love the wings and the flame.
  
  But sometimes I thought my
  vision was only a symbol of much greater realities.
  
  Thus passionately I raised myself up to be mocked and pitied.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  There is nothing good after death.
  
  As to God: I know not whether he is good.
  
  I know not whether
  he exists.
  
  I have stood and gazed at the star-
  Swarming cloud.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Out of huge delusion
  My truth is born.
  
  It has nothing to do with the dead; I loved the
  living and taught them to love each other.
  
  Even now on earth my love makes war upon death and misery,
  not like a sword, like a young seed,
  And not men's souls, but far down the terrible fertile future their
  children, changed and saved by love,
  May build the beauty of an earthly heaven on all our dead anguishes,
  and living inherit it.
  
  SINGERS   Do you hear?
  
  He says that we inherit
  Heaven on the instant and the roofs are tiled
  With the flame-wings, the high-singing angels, the rose-color
  wings, the wild
  Fire-color wings, the violet-fire feathers and spirit over spirit
  For tile over tile overlapping from the ridges downward .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  OTHER SINGERS   (hoarse voices; a heavier tune)
  The arrow is like air but the held spear enters.
  
  The pike is a pearl, pushes its path.
  
  Ha! says the sword, ham-strings the horses.
  
  The hooking halberd, the Hun from the saddle-ridge,
  Ha! says the halberd .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (more quietly) the fear, the pain.
  
  The knees that sag while the blood runs out, the dizzy sickness,
  The choking struggle, the horror of death .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   Another variety of dreamers.
  
  They pass like pulses from
  a cut artery.
  
  I saw Hoegni in the press
  Furiously stabbing imaginary princes; and Blada leading his
  lonely fancy of ten thousand horse,
  His private death-dream.
  
  OTHER SINGERS   Claw, green cat,
  Roll it home to Roua.
  
  Cat of the standard!
  You have felt the claws, Goth?
  
  The teeth excel them.
  
  (quietly) Oh, the terror.
  
  The darkness of wounds, the fallen riders, the red agonies.
  
  OTHER SINGERS   Wolves for your hunger horse-meat and Hunmeat.
  
  Weary not, West-wolves, worry to the bone.
  
  (quietly) The horror, the hidden cowardice,
  The stifling agonies.
  
  GUDRUN   What a wretched fisherman is death,
  That lets his catch lie kicking in the nets of delusion like living
  men.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  A sudden silence has covered them.
  
  THE YOUNG MAN   The cloud that veiled it: Oh breaking, breaking.
  
  The stars like dust flee apart, perhaps for the face of
  God .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The height clears.
  
  It is the great cliff under the mountain-peak,
  precipitous, with a shallow concavity and over-balance,
  like the face of a breaking wave.
  
  A vast form, in appearance
  youthful and human, beautiful and powerful, is bound
  against the rock, banging on heavy chains from the wrists,
  and bleeding from wounds.
  
  The figure resembles the Prometheus
  painted on the wall of the ruined house where Attila
  feasted; but this is more beautiful, and not a painting.
  
  THE YOUNG MAN   I hoped.
  
  I am finally betrayed and perfectly
  fooled to the end.
  
  It is only my dream of my own death
  Hanged on the sky.
  
  Blind stars, return.
  
  SINGERS   Oh stars return, Oh mind
  Remember the earth or be suddenly blind.
  
  I see the pride of an eagle nailed up alive.
  
  A leopard pierced with spears that transfix the stone.
  
  Enormous helpless shoulder-storms of an eagle nailed there: yet
  strive, wings, strive.
  
  Sharp strength come down, be free.
  
  Oh lonely virtue, Oh alone
  Beauty and power.
  
  Bright snake nailed on the stone.
  
  GUDRUN   Leopard, serpent, eagle?
  
  Wounded power?
  
  Oh, but
  lovelier.
  
  The hanged God that my childish blood loves.
  
  This is my barbarous blood from the north, from the sick swamps
  and the heavy forest, white fogs and frosts,
  My vicious blood .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  was it spilt?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  i my vicious love flies
  to him like sighing fire like the tides of the sea*
  I know not moon nor stars, how low you lie, lynx, I have come
  to my love, I have found him.
  
  Here is the dignity
  We adored in rocks and waters, the reticent self-contained self-watchful
  passion of the gray rock
  The greatness of high rivers going west; here is the comeliness
  I knew in heroes, the high beauty of the helmets,
  The praise of Sigurd; here is the pain in myself and all.
  
  Here is
  reality,
  All that my living eyes ever saw was phantom
  Shadows of this.
  
  Myself too: I was nothing but only a sigh
  toward him.
  
  For this I killed my brothers,
  For this I let Sigurd be killed: I never knew myself
  Before this moment: I know that I consented in Sigurd's death.
  
  Layer after layer I am stripped
  Of falsehood under falsehood and fear under fear, and know my
  naked center in the flame of reality,
  The sun of this beauty, the song of burning.
  
  To this I am willingly
  sacrificed, I have come to my love, I have found him,
  I have aped him and shared his life, like the white horses the
  Swedes hang up to Odin, from the porch lintels
  Of pillared Upsala.
  
  THE YOUNG MAN   He is not a phantom.
  
  The stubborn violent
  rays and strain of reality
  Glow from those tortured limbs, I know them, I have found
  what I was all my life seeking, and all my death,
  The power my life-delusion called Father, and never feared him
  and never .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  hated him .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  before this time.
  
  I wish the waters of Palestine had been white fire, devouring the
  flesh with the spirit before I sought to him.
  
  I wish my mother had been slain with a sword before she conceived
  me, or shame had killed her when the unknown seed
  Knocked at the womb.
  
  He is terribly beautiful.
  
  He is like a great flower of fire on a mountain in the night of
  victory, he is like a great star that fills all the night,
  He is like the music and harmony of all the stars if all their shining
  were harp-music.
  
  He has no righteousness,
  No mercy, no love.
  
  SINGERS   Peace, and the vast
  Expanse of the soaring storms, the peace of the eagle
  Forever circling
  Perfectly forever alone, no prey and no mate.
  
  What peace but pain?
  
  His eyes are put out, he has fountains of blood for eyes,
  He endures the anguish.
  
  But if he had eyes there is nothing for him to see
  But his own blood falling,
  He is all that exists.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  GUDRUN   It is bitter in me
  That I fled out of life, while I see the beauty of power overcoming
  pain, and the earnest eyes.
  
  I think that Gunnar was born a fool, and now I know Carling.
  
  Hoegni had a glimmer of the beauty, he burned
  A little pure, if pure killer.
  
  And Brynhild beautifully did evil
  and died.
  
  Sigurd .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  a noise
  Flung up by fortune.
  
  I have come to my love, if only in a partial
  vision: his greater part
  No poet can know.
  
  THE YOUNG MAN   The fire on the mountain
  Lights all my depth: I see the ridiculous delusion that gave me
  power and the ways that led up to Golgotha,
  The delusion dies, the power survives it.
  
  I am not conquered.
  
  I
  set myself up against you, Oh merciless
  God not my father.
  
  On earth an old wave of time is fallen and
  a new one draws
  From the trough to tower higher: my spirit is the light in it,
  I am remembered, this age is mine.
  
  I have bought it with the stubborn faith of my people, and my own
  Insane idealism, the wine of my wounds, the tension of intolerable
  hope.
  
  Let me remembered
  Be a new spirit of mercy in the new age, a new equality between
  men, that each
  Unblinded behold the beauty of all others: thence happiness and
  peace .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  my longing chokes me.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  When men are
  happy
  Let them cut the crosses out of the churches, no man remember
  me.
  
  GUDRUN   He is beautiful, this easterner, but like a child
  Desiring what men despise.
  
  Happiness?
  
  For all the living?
  
  How
  shamefacedly we should have to kill it
  As if it were evil.
  
  Hoegni'd run white and stabbing through the
  world, and well stabbed, Hoegni.
  
  I can't think why.
  
  SINGERS   (Scattered multitude, seen moving among the rocks at
  the Hanged God's feet, or like meteors across the sky at his knees)
  If once I could see the poplars again that ring the cistern
  Whiten their leaves
  I could bear to have died.
  
  They are fed with sun and the flashing water, from the high
  thunder-cloud
  Falls a stray wind
  To the mountain foot.
  
  What enemy has maimed you and nothing perfect?
  
  The cloud on the mountain is black, on the plain a small golden
  dust-cloud
  Where men race horses;
  The cool round cistern's
  Blue eye glitters, the pale poplars for eyelashes; dark
  Rises the mountain
  To the roaring cloud.
  
  Oh wounds of God, storm of stars, broken wings.
  
  At Cartagena on the broken sea-wall spikes of white grass
  Used to be shuddering,
  You saw blue water
  Through the spikes of dry grass, Oh why must I weep for those
  Pale rays wavering
  In sea-cloud wind?
  
  I would the enemy that wounded him had killed him.
  
  The Christinas fir-trees crack with burdens of snow, how low
  Low you lie, lynx,
  The torn throat's flow
  Is red but the wolves glitter with frost and snow, their spears
  Red in a row
  Around the red pool.
  
  He is beautiful, I fear his wounds are not mortal.
  
  Ah Sigurd that I was mourning Adonis the mistletoe lance,
  Hoegni nail hard
  The hero's hands
  To the eagle wings, make him more than a man, die for me Christ,
  Thammuz to death,
  Dermot go down.
  
  What boar's tusk opened God's flank; what enemy has bound
  his wrists,
  Nailed him on the eagle
  Wave of the mountain?
  
  Die, dear .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  dear .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  quietly like sleeping, Carling, drink sleep.
  
  Oh how you shudder.
  
  Again?
  
  Again?
  
  The cool black water Oh red lips of fever, burning harsh lips,
  Dear, die.
  
  Oh dreadful
  Agony of God can you never die?
  
  The mountain storm-cloud of stars, mounded and towering, multitude,
  thunder-cloud
  Dark with the blinding arrogance of light: what a black
  Lightning from that!
  I say have you learned from the Roman Christ to be meek and
  hang there,
  For love of humanity perhaps!
  Hanged like a beast's hide?
  
  Bound captive who looks like power, like the eagle of battles,
  when you shudder in the agony huge bands of strength
  Move in the arms to the groove of the breast as if you might
  conquer many but an enemy has conquered you.
  
  By craft then?
  
  Or like the young Jew
  For you loved your enemy perhaps!
  Why do you call him impure, there is no impurity in fire there's pain,
  Me Attila and Christ defiled in vain.
  
  The grave slow sunset bleeding at the end of enormous lands,
  Always to bleed,
  Never go down,
  I would I had worn my life with a little valor while I lived
  And the earnest beauty of things
  Was always reproaching me.
  
  O sola beatitude,
  Lonely bleeding star
  So high, so high
  Over the multitudes.
  
  I believe because it is unbelievable, there is my victory.
  
  What is that rushing in the air,
  That moaning on earth?
  
  Witches and Maries at the foot of the gallows
  And over the post and the peak and the superscription in the
  furiously pouring
  Rage of the stars
  Riding Valkyries.
  
  Come up Grimalkin my long-nosed sister.
  
  Is it you, Birdalow?
  
  Naked and greased
  Swim in the storm.
  
  I am old and have flapping breasts.
  
  Bind a birth-strangled man-child's
  February bud
  In the hollow between them.
  
  Oh hell's the horror.
  
  Hush! Hell's the horror.
  
  Shut your
  mouth, woman!
  Lord Satan wishes
  That hell hushes.
  
  Blood fire in the mouths of eternal furnaces, Oh Oh no hope
  no help no end, save me Christ.
  
  No.
  
  You must be sacrificed.
  
  I'll hang with my lord then, my beautiful honey-love Satan.
  
  Snow no.
  
  It's God.
  
  Satan was burnt.
  
  Ah! but to nothing.
  
  Gone, destroyed, nothing.
  
  Loathing?
  
  Snow, nothing.
  
  Oh lucky prince.
  
  Do you hear the storm of the wind rattling the gibbet
  Chains?
  
  The lynx has got out of chains, what reins
  Will now bridle him?
  
  The wind's idle hymn,
  The girls on black horses, the chaste Valkyries.
  
  And who is to lead us in that day?
  
  The gnomes of the chaste machines?
  
  Not they.
  
  What, the scared rich?
  
  Snow: the sword.
  
  Into the ditch.
  
  Man has no nobler lord.
  
  Now the age points to the pit, all our vocation
  Is to teach babes to jump.
  
  Oh sterile
  Process of Caesars, all the barren Caesars.
  
  Look at us, God, we are part of you: not defiled?
  
  not imbecile
  Children sold for the seventh
  Share in a toy, a motor or a music-box, push-button comforts,
  a paper world?
  
  I would the enemy that wounded you had killed you.
  
  I would the shores and the valleys were sheeted with fire and the
  mountain volcano's
  Vomit on the plains, when the feet were burnt off we should
  fall on our hands and fire
  Lap at the wrists and cut them and the faces fall in it.
  
  We are
  many, and strangely
  Powerful, knowing metals, knowing drugs, we have counted
  the stars, we have conquered the mastery of wings, and
  there's not one of us
  Worthy to live, pure enough, proud enough.
  
  So they say.
  
  What, they think life is great?
  
  I have had my day:
  Life is too little to love, too little to hate.
  
  Temperately share the house
  With beetle and louse.
  
  At the head of the beautiful glen
  The mountain is crowned with dawn and his purple shoulders
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  There are fox-gloves here, at the foot
  How the sea flames.
  
  The sun will come through it in a moment,
  Saying "I desire to die, let me die.
  
  I hate myself, I writhe from myself in fountains of fire
  And fall back frustrate, something escapes, wastes into light,
  waste is my want,
  I pour my body on the eyeless night
  And a few planets the rain
  Of golden pain,
  But knowing that annihilation's no promise, but on and on
  New flesh catches old bone .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  INHUMAN VOICES   I am the whale's way.
  
  What, for their woes?
  
  I am the old
  Dragon of blue water.
  
  Rock and the snow, Aconcagua, Gosainthan, Kinchinjunga, all
  High-builded cloud-knives,
  Heads of the earth, here is our sky-head.
  
  Blazing I gaze, I am the sun, never to find
  Purpose nor worth: why do I shine?
  
  Why shall I die?
  
  I am the sun.
  
  Fire-swarm of wheeling vultures of light, torch-multitude
  Turning in the emptiness,
  Hungry for darkness, I am the galaxy.
  
  Darkness for all-heal?
  
  I am an old
  Out-lier, a cloud of
  Coal-black vultures, universe of slag, caught in the fork.
  
  I have
  eaten darkness.
  
  I am the shoreless
  Ocean of stars, crazy to shed
  My desire from me.
  
  I am power,
  Pushing so close against the fountain that I can hardly
  Distinguish myself from him; I am the doer, pale with desire,
  never to know
  What is my want, where is the end; stone-eyed and lightning-
  Handed and sleepless.
  
  VOICES   What horse will you ride, Katta?
  
  The crazy black.
  
  I was broken yesterday.
  
  Life was an idiot dreaming, death's his kept ape.
  
  Sir, we guessed that last August in Macedonia,
  The night we turned atheist by a dry-weed campfire
  Drinking bitterness and spitting vinegar.
  
  Hush it thunders.
  
  THE HANGED GOD   Pain and their endless cries.
  
  How they cry to
  me: but they are I: let them ask themselves.
  
  I am they, and there is nothing beside.
  
  I am alone and time passes,
  time also is in me, the long
  Beat of this unquiet heart, the quick drip of this blood, the whirl
  and returning waves of these stars,
  The course of this thought.
  
  My particles have companions and happy fulfilments, each star
  has stars to answer him and hungry night
  To take his shining, and turn it again and make it a star; each
  beast has food to find and his mating,
  And the hostile and helpful world; each atom has related atoms,
  and hungry emptiness around him to take
  His little shining cry and cry it back; but I am all, the emptiness
  and all, the shining and the night.
  
  All alone, I alone.
  
  If I were quiet and emptied myself of pain,
  breaking these bonds,
  Healing these wounds: without strain there is nothing.
  
  Without
  pressure, without conditions, without pain,
  Is peace; that's nothing, not-being; the pure night, the perfect
  freedom, the black crystal.
  
  I have chosen
  Being; therefore wounds, bonds, limits and pain; the crowded
  mind and the anguished nerves, experience and ecstasy.
  
  Whatever electron or atom or flesh or star or universe cries to me,
  Or endures in shut silence: it is my cry, my silence; I am the
  nerve, I am the agony,
  I am the endurance.
  
  I torture myself
  To discover myself; trying with a little or extreme experiment
  each nerve and fibril, all forms
  Of being, of life, of cold substance; all motions and netted complications
  of event,
  All poisons of desire, love, hatred, joy, partial peace, partial vision.
  
  Discovery is deep and endless,
  Each moment of being is new: therefore I still refrain my burning
  thirst from the crystal-black
  Water of an end.
  
  My lips crack with their longing for it,
  My wounds are fires, the white bones glitter in my iron-eaten
  wrists, blood slowly falls, blinding white bands
  Of fire flow through the strained shoulder-blades, so that I groan
  for an enemy to kill: there is none: I alone.
  
  Stars are condensed from cloud and flame as it were immortally,
  and faint and have ceased, and their slag finds
  After enormous ages the mother cloud; self-regenerating universes
  all but eternally
  Shine, tire, and die; new stars fling out new planets, strange
  growths appear on them, new-formed little lamps of flickering
  Flesh for the same flame.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  On earth rise and fall the ages
  of man, going higher for a time; this age will give them
  Wings, their old dream, and unexampled extensions of mind; and
  slowly break itself bloodily; one later
  Will give them to visit their neighbor planets and colonize the
  evening star; their colonies die there; the waves
  Of human dominion dwindle down their long twilight; another
  nature of life will dominate the earth,
  Feathered birds, drawing in their turn the planetary
  Consciousness up to bright painful points, and accuse me of inflicting
  what I endure.
  
  These also pass,
  And new things are; and the shining pain.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Every discovery
  is a broken shield, a new knife of consciousness
  Whetted for its own hurt; pain rises like a red river: but also
  the heroic beauty of being,
  That all experience builds higher, the stones are the warring
  torches, towers on the flood.
  
  I have not chosen
  To endure eternally; I know not that I shall choose to cease; I
  have long strength and can bear much.
  
  I have also my peace; it is in this mountain.
  
  I am this mountain
  that I am hanged on, and I am the flesh
  That suffers on it, I am tortured against the summit of my own
  peace and hanged on the face of quietness.
  
  I am also the outer nothing and the wandering infinite night.
  
  These are my mercy and my goodness, these
  My peace.
  
  Without the pain, no knowledge of peace, nothing.
  
  Without the peace,
  No value in the pain.
  
  I have long strength.
  
  SINGERS   The long river
  Dreams in the sunset fire
  Shuddering and shining.
  
  All the drops of his blood are torches.
  
  I am one with him, I will share his being.
  
  Alas to me the deep wells of peace are a dearer water.
  
  GUDRUN   I will enter the cloud of stars, I will eat the whole serpent again.
  
  SINGERS   His beauty redeems his acts, it is good for God
  Not to be quiet, but for men not to live long.
  
  Forever if I could: his intelligencer
  Spying the wild loveliness.
  
  But after I have rested as it were a moment
  Against the deep wells, and then
  I am willing to eat the whole serpent again .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The river down the long darkness
  Shining writhes like a fire,
  The stars return.

• At The Fall Of An Age Read Poem Log in to favourite

  (The story of Achilles rising from the dead for love of Helen
  is well enough known.
  
  That of Polyxo's vengeance may be less
  familiar; it can be found in Pausanias' "Description of Greece,"
  explaining the Rhodian worship of Helen as Dendritis, the treegoddess.
  
  )
  The scene is the fore-court of a noble dwelling on the island of
  Rhodes.
  
  Portico of the house, with steps of heavy stone and
  painted wooden columns, but all worn and old.
  
  Black pine-forest
  on the hill behind.
  
  One great pine stands to the left of the steps,
  near the house-wall; it is old, with contorted boughs, one of
  which overhangs the steps.
  
  The time is nearly twenty years after
  the fall of Troy.
  
  Enter a shepherd and his little son, the shepherd leading a reluctant
  lamb by a noosed thong.
  
  They come from the right
  foreground, and go toward the left.
  
  THE SHEPHERD   The gods get hungry like you and me, so it has to die.
  
  THE BOY   But you called her mine; you promised that I might
  rear her.
  
  Oh father.
  
  THE SHEPHERD   I can't help that.
  
  You have a shepherd's eye and
  you chose the perfect one.
  
  We eat the runts and the lame,
  the gods want perfection; the run of the season, that is
  neither poor nor perfect, is for wool and breeding.
  
  Choose again.
  
  THE BOY   Only to lose again.
  
  A man comes in running, from the left.
  
  THE SHEPHERD   Hey, Fisherman?
  
  THE FISHERMAN   (breathless) You had better fetch in your flock,
  and tell cowboy.
  
  Pirates I think.
  
  THE SHEPHERD   What, what, what?
  
  THE FISHERMAN   Ohey, the house! Who is at the door?
  
  A ship
  has landed.
  
  THE PORTER   Who's there?
  
  A ship?
  
  THE FISHERMAN   Armed men coming ashore from a black ship.
  
  I left Calcho watching.
  
  The porter turns in the doorway.
  
  Shouting is heard from
  'within the house.
  
  The shepherd and boy scurry away out of
  sight, tugging the lamb.
  
  THE PORTER What kind of a ship?
  
  THE FISHERMAN   (breathless) Akh.
  
  Akh.
  
  The kind that people sail in.
  
  A few men with spears or pikes begin to come down between
  the columns; one is adjusting a leather helmet, another struggles
  clumsily with his shield.
  
  Calcho comes in from the left.
  
  He is a fisherman too, and carries
  the trident fish-spear of his trade.
  
  THE FIRST FISHERMAN   Oh, here is Calcho.
  
  Didn't they catch you?
  
  THE PORTER   Where are they, Calcho?
  
  Raiding the pasture?
  
  Speak, man.
  
  CALCHO   They are coming quietly up the path.
  
  The spearmen begin to form across the courtyard, at the foot
  of the steps.
  
  The first fisherman edges around behind them.
  
  THE PORTER   What?
  
  Armed men?
  
  (turning) My lady .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  He moves to the side, to stand by one of the columns.
  
  Polyxo,
  the lady of the house, comes to the head of the steps, and
  speaks across the spearheads below her.
  
  POLYXO   Tell me what you have seen, Calcho.
  
  CALCHO   We dare not launch; the west is too full of wind; we
  drop our lines from the rock.
  
  I heard oars groaning;
  That long black ship glided below us like a dream and came in
  and landed.
  
  These are some great lord's men;
  I watched when they leaped the strake.
  
  They have fierce obedient
  faces; their life is outside them; they would do anything
  Without winking.
  
  As for the woman with them .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  POLYXO   A woman?
  
  CALCHO  For whom they laid the plank to the strand;
  I watched and her beauty was like the thoughts of God, burning
  and calm.
  
  POLYXO   We knew one like that:
  Gold and fire and ivory; King Menelaus his adulterous wife: that
  Helen, for whose lawless luxury
  Ten thousand died; the lord of my love and of this island among
  them .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  for a wanton.
  
  If this were that fountain
  Of death! We've prayed for it; did the men speak like Spartans?
  
  I dream too much.
  
  CALCHO   Not a word.
  
  He looks behind him, and joins the defenders of the house,
  holding his trident as they hold their pikes.
  
  The strangers
  come in, masked identically, moving like one machine.
  
  The
  woman with them might be either their captive or their
  queen; a fold of her cloak is drawn over her face.
  
  POLYXO   Who are you, strangers?
  
  It is peace I think?
  
  The woman drops her cloak from her face and head; the hair
  is golden and the face ivory.
  
  An exclamation like a sigh of
  wonder is heard among Polyxo's people.
  
  HELEN   Peace and love, dear.
  
  POLYXO   (shuddering) Ah.
  
  Yes.
  
  Your face, Helen,
  Has been much in my dreams.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  My eyes are too old to see
  only the beauty among the tricks of the world.
  
  What are these warriors?
  
  HELEN   I’ll tell you that in the house, when you
  are kind.
  
  Do you remember, Polyxo,
  A day in spring, you and I were laughing together beside the
  flooded Eurotas?
  
  I garlanded
  Your dear dark head with flowers before we bathed together,
  parting the green reeds of the bank.
  
  Our skies were clear and no grief had come; you were my guest then.
  
  Now I am yours.
  
  The household spearmen have moved to right and left of the
  steps at the word "peace" so that the space between the two
  women is cleared; Polyxo standing at the head of the steps and
  Helen in front of her guard.
  
  POLYXO   Grief has come; and that day is dead.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  A man was
  here last year from Laconia
  Passing to Egypt, who boasted that neither time nor grief nor
  weariness touched Helen's face.
  
  We judged him A liar.
  
  HELEN   You find me much changed, Polyxo.
  
  POLYXO   Changed?
  
  A woman
  who has been a wild cause of misery and death
  Will surely be pale with repentance; a woman famously unfaithful,
  surely purple with shame; a woman
  Pursued by the ghosts of slaughtered men and a screaming city-could
  hardly escape marking I think:
  The cheeks furrowed, and the eyes a haggard stare between the
  red eyelids .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Nothing nothing nothing
  Not a line, not a mark.
  
  You have wandered through life uncaring,
  untouched, heartless, unmarked, and all your wickedness
  Is like a song.
  
  HELEN   Must I not love you any more, once my dear friend?
  
  POLYXO   Whilst I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh, your beauty is pure,
  Young and burning and holy; you are not changed from the
  bride Menelaus unveiled or the young wife
  The long soft eyes of Paris lustfully lingered on; whilst I look at me.
  
  She uncovers her head, throwing down the Tynan headdress;
  her thin gray-white hair, corded throat and wrinkled cheeks are seen.
  
  It was no trick of mine
  That drew ten thousand down to black death and burnt the chief
  towers of Asia.
  
  But you the gods have made
  To look pure forever.
  
  The gods do strangely.
  
  Perhaps .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  they leave justice to men.
  
  HELEN   They are in their cloud;
  we know too little about them.
  
  We know
  They love and surely reward the hospitable house.
  
  May I go
  into your house, Polyxo?
  
  I am homeless.
  
  We have come far; weary are the waves.
  
  POLYXO   Not yet.
  
  I am thinking
  what gift .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Is Menelaus behind you
  Baying on the trail?
  
  He will find it hard perhaps to raise the Greek
  princes a second time.
  
  HELEN   My lord
  Grew old, and has left me, in the aging world.
  
  Carved stones contain
  him, with all the careful honors of death,
  In high Therapnse.
  
  POLYXO   Well old.
  
  Some have died
  Young.
  
  You are all alone then?
  
  If any evil-disposed or remembering
  person should do you hurt,
  No husband would come, nor no fierce lover, to find the quarrel
  and avenge you?
  
  It is bitter to be left alone.
  
  I have learned that.
  
  HELEN   Very bitter.
  
  Worse to be exiled.
  
  Old friends
  I see begin to regard you
  Strangely and coldly; they let you stand at the door.
  
  POLYXO   I have not only myself to think of, but all
  This island people.
  
  You come questionably.
  
  Tell me who exiled
  you, for what new .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  we'll not say crime: the .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Adventures of one so immortally beautiful must not be called .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  HELEN   Call them, Oh my lost friend, by any
  Bleak shameful name that your heart can bear, but not me beautiful.
  
  That name is my hill of miseries.
  
  Many
  Women are beautiful; and some have peace; and a few are happy.
  
  I am exiled indeed, but for no crime.
  
  The sons of Menelaus by that other woman have always hated me.
  
  They inherit the kingdom, and I
  Am exiled.
  
  POLYXO   Not without reason; they would give the people a reason.
  
  HELEN   I am not here to be judged.
  
  A storm
  That struck Therapnae, and the living dead, perhaps had frightened
  them.
  
  POLYXO   What is this?
  
  You shall tell me all the story
  Before you come in my door.
  
  HELEN   (turning to her guardsmen)
  Servants of Achilles: you see that
  friendship is a fading and fragile hope
  Among the living.
  
  With you in the high sepulchres
  It stands, if anything does.
  
  Oh soldiers, where will you take me, to
  what refuge, if I refuse
  To humble myself before this woman, but turn and shake off the
  eyes of Rhodes and enter the ship,
  Where will you sail to?
  
  THE CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD   Queen: to the mound on the Asian
  foreland.
  
  You know our condition: that we have no home
  But the high, holy and quiet sepulchre.
  
  A ship is made to sail
  home; we shall hasten home.
  
  HELEN   (shuddering) Ah, Ah.
  
  I knew that!
  THE CAPTAIN   The west wind still wildly blows.
  
  HELEN   Oh soldiers: you
  know that Achilles your master loved me.
  
  Look north;
  You can see from here like a blue shadow on the raging sea
  Ancient Crete, and the snows of Cretan Mount Ida; take me there
  and leave me; leave me on the sand
  Like a beggar woman, and hasten home.
  
  THE CAPTAIN   We must not beach the
  black prow again, we must hasten home.
  
  HELEN
  To the burial-hill.
  
  To the wailing Trojan ghosts.
  
  To dust and
  ashes.
  
  (She turns toward the house.
  
  ) I will contrive to be
  humble.
  
  Polyxo:   I am the woman
  Whom Theseus loved, and high-born Menelaus, and beautiful-throated
  Paris, and Deiphobus,
  And one greater than these more terribly, whom I shall name.
  
  I
  would rather have been a shepherd's daughter
  To run barefoot and milk the mountain ewes, and pat the curd
  into cheeses.
  
  POLYXO   Far better for you;
  Or else to be strangled at birth.
  
  HELEN Yet I remember the good gray
  elders of Troy, having seen their sons
  For my sake slain, and knowing me the poison in the city's heartyet
  when they passed me, walking like kings,
  They would look at my face with love, they never reproached
  me.
  
  I have memories of men doing nobly, to make me patient
  In the day of humiliation.
  
  (She stands in silence, struggling 'with her pride, 'while Polyxo
  bitterly 'watches.
  
  Helen continues
  But Achilles,
  Violent and fierce, whom nothing could bind: for while he lived
  he dared affront Agamemnon the king,
  And had no reverence for beautiful human flesh, but pierced the
  shining feet of Hector slain
  And dragged him about and about the city at the chariot's tail,
  defiling the beautiful heroic body;
  But after he was dead he opposed
  The purpose of God.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  He said my remembered face tormented
  him, he had no reverence but lusted for me,
  In his life he had never known me, in his death he lusted.
  
  He
  wrestled with Death in the shut darkness; he broke
  The mighty wrists and the mound of burial.
  
  He stood on the
  broken head of the mound and shouted to his men,
  Whose graves pit the wide plain.
  
  They had never failed to obey
  him, they heard and rose.
  
  All the fierce Myrmidons,
  Dark faces and fire in the hollow eye-sockets and earth-matted
  hair; staring they stood.
  
  These men here
  Are of those that stood up.
  
  (Movement of Polyxo's people.
  
  They retreat a little, but a
  line of the best draws across the foot of the steps again, so that
  Polyxo is seen again above spearheads.
  
  She herself shows fear,
  but says
  POLYXO   Go on.
  
  Tell it all.
  
  Whatever I resolve
  to do will not be shaken
  By the lies of the poets you listen to in idle Sparta
  Or lonely Therapnse in the long evenings.
  
  HELEN   I would to God it
  were lies.
  
  Why do you hate me, Polyxo?
  
  POLYXO  Tell your tale.
  
  HELEN   I cannot.
  
  I will not.
  
  Soldiers:
  Will you not speak?
  
  THE MYRMIDONS   (clashing their shields, and making a heavy
  pacing dance, as of bronze puppets; but I think only the
  leader speaks.
  
  )
  We that broke the walls
  And tore open the citadel of Asia,
  And the holy city of Priam like a gored ship
  Foundered in the roaring seas of our blood:
  We have sacked the empire of Death also.
  
  They planted strange seed in Asia who buried Achilles.
  
  The earth had received us and we broke the earth;
  The hands of God were upon us to hold us under;
  We broke the fingers of God and Fate;
  They planted wild seed in Asia who buried Achilles.
  
  When we camped in the dead
  Metropolis, we dead, there was nothing living but a wolf and a dog;
  The very swallows were burnt
  That used to twitter in the eaves of Troy.
  
  Where Priam and the silken processions
  Went delicately
  By the great hewn stones; in the morning
  We pissed on the stones and knew that we dead lived,
  And went south from there
  Fasting, until we came to a town and killed it.
  
  Punic ships lay on the shore.
  
  They planted strange seed in Asia who buried Achilles.
  
  Oh high blue water
  And whirling currents in the lee of islands,
  Purple nights and blue days,
  Were you not pierced, were you not trampled?
  
  Bear witness how his great heart burned you,
  Toward this woman he burned.
  
  HELEN
  Stand farther, soldiers.
  
  I cannot bear.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh Polyxo, save me.
  
  Though love is dead and friendship forgotten,
  The living should guard the living, and a woman ought to have
  pity on a woman .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  THE MYRMIDONS   We beached at sundown
  And struck in the night, in the gathered storm.
  
  King Menelaus said "What are these?
  
  "
  And the spear-point was at his beard.
  
  "Dorian barbarians?
  
  "
  Look under the torches, Oh King, that flare in the wind in the gates,
  Look under the torches.
  
  The Dorians have yellow hair; ours is earth-dark.
  
  The Dorians have black iron helmets, ours are green bronze.
  
  They planted strange seed in Asia who buried Achilles.
  
  HELEN
  Be silent, be silent! It is all true.
  
  There was only a little guard at
  Therapnac.
  
  Our troops were north
  On the borders, in the doors of the north.
  
  They took the high
  house and held Therapnae.
  
  The storm raged, and the thunder
  Shook the towers, while Achilles possessed me.
  
  It is true: he
  came and possessed me.
  
  His body was not like death-
  Only his eyes.
  
  THE MYRMIDONS   We were the door-holders.
  
  Our master went in and laid off his armor, and the queen of
  Laconia
  Screamed once, and then sweetly smiled.
  
  The wild male power of the world
  Was mated with the perfect beauty.
  
  While Menelaus outside the gate
  Howled like a dog in the violet lightnings in the gaps of night
  For spears, but all his were fleeing to the mountain.
  
  And the Gods came down against us and we held the doors.
  
  HELEN
  You are not a rock but a woman: let me go in, let me go in!
  From public shame, and this furnace of eyes.
  
  POLYXO   Menelaus died?
  
  HELEN   Not that night.
  
  He did die, Of old age, the next day.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I was compelled, undefended.
  
  POLYXO   We are not
  blind, we can see you are beautiful
  Enough to have stung the body of a violent man in the very
  ashes.
  
  But I am a woman, and not
  A loving woman.
  
  Tell me, you dead and stationed soldiers, where
  is your master, this woman's lover?
  
  I desire not to offend him by .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  any act toward this woman,
  if she is still claimed.
  
  We have no force
  In our pastoral island to oppose the power
  That humbled warlike Therapnae bristling with spears.
  
  THE LEADER OF THE MYRMIDONS   YOU hide
  a knife in your mind, but not too darkly
  For eyes that have looked through hollow death, and are whetted
  and disillusioned, nor too dreadful.
  
  We are charged
  To keep this woman whom our lord has enjoyed intact of any
  less lover until she dies.
  
  When she dies we may hasten home.
  
  HELEN   Will you plot against me
  before my face?
  
  And vainly.
  
  I can pity delusion
  Even in dead men; whatever it is you would sell, she will not
  buy.
  
  My friend has grown cold, but not
  Wicked; not monstrous; one can see that without looking
  through hollow death.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  As to Achilles,
  I will tell you, Polyxo.
  
  He went away from Therapnae in the
  stormy dawn, gathering his men,
  Only detaching these few to guard me.
  
  He returned to the
  ships; and one had been burned, he took one of ours;
  And sailed away to fetch west for the island Leuke, that white
  Atlantic splendor in the waves, to find there
  The peace, he said, that even the most beautiful woman never
  can give.
  
  For there one is free of death's
  Dreams as of life's.
  
  He will never return.
  
  I tell you because I
  trust you.
  
  POLYXO   That is true.
  
  Whatever you've done,
  Your blood is noble.
  
  The free-born
  Trust gayly where a slave trembles.
  
  I have determined what
  I will do.
  
  HELEN  Why are you trembling, Polyxo?
  
  POLYXO
  We are not accustomed to seeing the dead land on this island.
  
  Come into the house.
  
  Come in.
  
  Let Helen
  Pass, but not those bronze corpses.
  
  THE LEADER OF THE MYRMIDONS   We deliver her to you.
  
  A VOICE AMONG POLYXO's MEN   Oh beautiful
  woman trust her not!
  POLYXO   Who spoke?
  
  HELEN
  I will go in without fear, although I think that you hate me for
  some reason.
  
  I'd not seek shelter
  In a house of cold welcome, but choice has been taken from me.
  
  The ship I came from goes home to black
  And quiet death.
  
  One endures a cold welcome liefer than death;
  I will lay down all pride
  And like a suppliant go in.
  
  But why do you tremble, Polyxo?
  
  POLYXO   Surely with
  eagerness.
  
  My house is honored.
  
  Helen approaches the steps, and the spears part to let her
  pass.
  
  Calcho leans from among the spears and 'whispers as
  she passes in.
  
  CALCHO
  Beautiful woman turn back.
  
  Look: her pressed lips mean evil.
  
  HELEN   Thank you, fisherman.
  
  POLYXO   What did that man
  Whisper across the trident?
  
  HELEN   Why, nothing, dear.
  
  He would bring
  me a speckled sea-trout or a great lamprey.
  
  He thinks I am used to kindness.
  
  Oh, why do you tremble so?
  
  POLYXO   The chill at
  sundown.
  
  Time brings all things.
  
  They go into the house.
  
  CALCHO   Evil is planned.
  
  Shall we let the most beautiful woman
  in the world fall into a trap, while we stand idle?
  
  ONE OF THE MEN   Well, it's a pity .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ANOTHER   You think our lady lays traps because she had you
  whipped once; but well you deserved it.
  
  THE MYRMIDONS
  Is there any stir in the house?
  
  Listen: or a cry?
  
  Farm-boys with spears, you sparrows
  Playing hawk, be silent.
  
  Splendid was life
  In the time of the heroes, the sun went helmeted, the moon was maiden,
  When glory gathered on Troy, the picketed horses
  Neighed in the morning, and long live ships
  Ran on the wave like eagle-shadows on the slopes of mountains.
  
  Then men were equal to things, the earth was beautiful, the
  crests of heroes
  Waved as tall as the trees.
  
  Now all is decayed, all corrupted, all gone down.
  
  Men move like mice under the shadows of trees,
  And the shadows of the tall dead.
  
  The brightness of fire is dulled,
  The heroes are gone.
  
  In naked shame Agamemnon
  Died of a woman.
  
  The sun is crusted and the moon tarnished,
  And Achilles has chosen peace.
  
  Tell me, you island spearmen, you plowboy warriors,
  Has anyone cried out in the dark door?
  
  Not yet.
  
  The earth darkens.
  
  Slate gray twilight has come; but later a high cloud catching
  light fills the scene with a confusing red radiance.
  
  At the fall of an age men must make sacrifice
  To renew beauty, to restore strength.
  
  We say that if the perfect beauty were sacrificed,
  The very beauty that makes our death-cleansed eyes
  Dazzle with tears, would be spread on the sky
  And earth like a banner.
  
  All men would begin to desire again, and value
  Come back to the earth, and splendor walk there.
  
  There is one perfection to be poured out, one lonely beauty
  Left in the world, as lonely as the last eagle.
  
  Has anyone groaned in the house?
  
  There it sounds.
  
  A sharp clear broken-off cry like a snapped arrow.
  
  CALCHO
  Dead wolves, will her death feed you?
  
  THE MYRMIDONS   Our trade was death.
  
  And now we have known it, it is nothing evil.
  
  CALCHO   Can we endure this?
  
  He and a few others are going up the steps, when Polyxo
  comes out and stands above.
  
  POLYXO   Clear the stones.
  
  Armed men are at her side; Calcho and his few -followers
  return down.
  
  POLYXO   You need not press in, you shall see all.
  
  I have caught
  the panther.
  
  Oh men of Rhodes, we sometimes exclaim against the great gods,
  when the guilty seem to flourish, and the innocent
  Fall unavenged.
  
  We are always rebuked at last.
  
  A murderer may
  flee to Caucasus but the broad eyes
  Hardly turn and behold him constantly, and see the knife
  whetting or the noose hanging, in the very gorge
  He runs to hide in, under the snow-shining walls and towers of
  the world.
  
  Do you remember my lord
  Tlepolemus, the husband of my soul and my body?
  
  I have caught
  his murderer.
  
  Numberless thousands have died
  By the war-making act of this one woman, the powers of Greece
  and the house of Priam; they are not perfectly
  Important to us here enisled, but Righteousness counted them;
  and while I avenge Tlepolemus the gods are here
  Avenging all.
  
  I have two black men I bought from Egypt, whose
  minds are not made like ours, they feel
  No shudder where a Greek would flinch; I bid them lead forth
  the murderess, so stripped and shamed as men who were
  stricken
  On the plain by Troy .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  as Tlepolemus .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah Ah .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  was robbed
  Of the hacked and dinted armor .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  all .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  that corselet I
  gave him: in the days when I was able to weep,
  And prayed it keep safe his breast; the Greeks retreated from his
  body fallen in the dust, and grooms and foot-soldiers
  Despoiled and stripped him, and left him naked under the glaring
  lion of heaven and the Trojan eyes,
  White flower in the foul dust, the body I had held in my arms,
  the flesh that my mouth had clung to.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Shall I not
  Shame this dead woman?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Come.
  
  Helen is led by slaves from the door, her hands bound behind
  her back.
  
  The confusing red twilight somewhat veils her
  nakedness.
  
  Her head is held high, and the eyes clear, though
  she struggles against the bonds, breathing hard through
  parted lips.
  
  Her yellow hair is disordered, and hangs like a
  heavy fleece on one shoulder.
  
  HELEN   (straining at the cords) Are you the stronger?
  
  Yet
  wretched to the end of time:
  Contempt and a hissing: whilst I overcome by treachery am
  more than equal to all that may hurt me.
  
  POLYXO   Here
  Is what made war.
  
  Look at it, because it will not be beautiful
  to-morrow.
  
  No warriors will quarrel for it.
  
  No one will cut through death to come to it.
  
  Now, now, I say,
  the old aching hatred, the very bitterness
  That fouled my wine with aloes and stained my meat with spilt
  gall, morning and evening all the empty years,
  Is turned sweet; it is better to taste than honey; it smells more
  lovely than myrrh and frankincense
  Hot from the south.
  
  You caught panther!
  I am glad that you were a queen in haughty Therapnae; it will
  be harder to die; I am glad you are beautiful
  Beyond fault, beyond nature: the ridiculous ugliness of death
  and corruption look the more dreadful to you;
  I am glad you had many lovers, you will lie alone; I am glad time
  could not touch you nor age deflower you,
  That your beauty is like the African crystal no point can scratch,
  unwoundable, uncontaminable;
  For what comes now shall very suddenly unpolish it.
  
  Ah, Ah, Ah,
  I am sick with delight.
  
  Call the black ravens, you beautiful
  woman.
  
  Oh Helen, black crows and heavy-beaked ravens to be your
  lovers, to kiss your eyes.
  
  Call the mountains
  Of Asia to look at you.
  
  HELEN   Rhodians: your mistress you see has
  gone mad, you must prevent her not for my sake,
  For your own honor from making this place forever abominable.
  
  POLYXO   (to a slave) Cast the rope over that branch.
  
  I shall sleep sound at last, who have lain year after year tortured
  remembering.
  
  To-morrow, coming
  From the door at dawn, I shall see my enemy's face puffed
  purple and her breasts blackening, and the dragged neck
  Not like a dove's, and those fine white feet
  Perhaps all shrivelled, perhaps all swollen, who knows?
  
  God,
  who sent her here, knows.
  
  Why do you wait?
  
  Fling the coil, slave, keep the noose in your hands.
  
  Hup! A good
  cast.
  
  I shall not sleep, but call
  Torches, and feast all night.
  
  HELEN   I see my dark shameful death.
  
  Hear
  me, Rhodians .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  POLYXO   Let her speak, haltered.
  
  The slave makes to hang the noose on her neck, but when
  she looks at him he stands back in awe of her.
  
  VOICES AMONG THE PEOPLE
  We cannot suffer this.
  
  Oh Oh Oh.
  
  Spear the black men, hang up the old woman.
  
  Pikes and fire, ah?
  
  Like spitted pigs.
  
  We dare.
  
  They move toward the steps.
  
  POLYXO
  I thought that you herd of dogs and peasants .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Here, the
  guard.
  
  Peasants: here are the men
  Who fought at Troy, men to be trusted, my house garrison.
  
  Fully armed soldiers, old men but dangerous, move mechanically
  in two files from the door, right and left of the group
  formed by POLYXO and HELEN and the slaves, and make a
  fence of spears at the foot of the steps.
  
  They are masked with
  identical faces of old grim 'warriors; between them and the
  Myrmidons the island militia, seethe like a rabble.
  
  POLYXO   Rabble, you
  know your boundary: the soldiers
  Of Tlepolemus.
  
  Few, but enough.
  
  These will not lust for a harlot.
  
  These are the men that saw
  The gods fighting, when the rivers of the plain flowed fire and
  the earth roared like water.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Veterans of Troy:
  It is mine to avenge your labor and pain and your leader's death;
  it is yours to keep those plowboys in awe
  And herd those herdsmen.
  
  THE MYRMIDONS
  Old men you ought to have died
  In your good years, not wearily
  Gone home to rust.
  
  If you had died and revived again
  Your hair would not be snowed under but brown as ours,
  And your eyes as fierce.
  
  POLYXO   (to the slave) I said, halter that woman.
  
  Between the
  dead and the living my hatred stands,
  HELEN
  Will you stand and let me be slain, you men of Rhodes?
  
  POLYXO
  What, is life sweet?
  
  Cry out.
  
  Weep publicly.
  
  Show all your
  mind, make all your grief like your body naked.
  
  Surely it is all as beautiful as your body, and I shall be merciful.
  
  THE MYRMIDONS
  It is beautiful to see men die by violence, but to watch a woman
  Killed, is the crown.
  
  Oh Queen, die boldly.
  
  HELEN   I pray you on my knees, Polyxo.
  
  Life is too dear to be spent on pride.
  
  I am not afraid, but I love
  life.
  
  POLYXO   I tell you, kneeling's
  Not half enough.
  
  You must act fear, if you feel none.
  
  Plead,
  scream.
  
  Helen stands again, and 'wrenches at the cords, twisting her
  body.
  
  THE MYRMIDONS   (coming nearer the house, pressing on the demoralized
  crowd)
  Queen, life and death are no better than the two ears of a carrion-
  Battening dog; there is nothing to choose.
  
  We know them both, and their beauty is beyond them, their
  beauty is the value,
  As yours is your beauty.
  
  We also were sacrificed.
  
  HELEN
  Dead wolves, fight for me.
  
  Save me.
  
  You could blow down this
  brittle stubble of Rhodian spears like summer
  Fire in the stubble.
  
  Flash your fangs, wolves.
  
  Fight, you bronze
  wolves.
  
  For I have the seed of Achilles in me.
  
  For your lord, for your leader's blood, not for me make war.
  
  THE MYRMIDONS
  Beautiful blossoms of battle again and forever unfolding
  Star the earth, but we dropped petals of one
  Shall endure peace, not even to behold them again nor to hear them,
  In the quiet places, in enormous neutrality.
  
  Oh perfectly beautiful, pain is brief, endure to be sacrificed.
  
  This great age falls like water and a new
  Age is at birth, but without your pain it could never be beautiful.
  
  The golden fleece of your hair, the straining
  Shoulders, the dove-throat, the breasts thrust forward by the
  strain of bonds,
  Shall yield their beauty to the earth and sky,
  The wonderful breasts their soul to all the flushed hills of earth,
  The long white thighs to the marble mountains.
  
  Mycenae is down in corruption but Athens will stand instead,
  The Dorians will make Laconia a land of helots.
  
  HELEN
  Dogs, not wolves.
  
  Death-whipped dogs.
  
  Hear me, veterans
  Of Rhodes, old valiant warmen that fought in Asia from the
  wall I watched you.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  No help, no help anywhere?
  
  I am brought to bay here between the bony mercy of unmanned
  old age and the eyeless pity of the dead.
  
  Do you see this ebony tool of murder hangs the halter on my
  throat, the strangling death?
  
  POLYXO   Helen:
  Speak quickly, for your end hastens.
  
  HELEN   I will speak.
  
  I have lived
  and seen the great beauty of things, and been loved and
  honored.
  
  If now I must die, it is come.
  
  Nothing on earth nor in ocean is
  hatefuller than death; at least I have not
  Wasted my life like this gray murderess, fouling with age, lying
  twenty years in the pit of time
  Grinding the rust on a knife.
  
  POLYXO   Take for your portion agony and
  shame.
  
  Sweep room there below, guardsmen.
  
  Haul, slaves.
  
  May all that cause war, thus perish.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It is dark;
  torches, torches! People of Rhodes, we have caught
  And hanged a panther.
  
  Pelt the white body with pine cones, pelt
  it with clods.
  
  While she is hanged, confused struggle in the brown twilight
  between the old guardsmen and the people.
  
  The Myrmidons,
  chanting in their pacing dance, take no part in it.
  
  THE MYRMIDONS
  Wild swan, splendid-bodied,
  Silent at last, silent and proud, fly up the dark.
  
  Clash bronze, beat shields, beauty is new-born.
  
  It is not to be whispered in Argos that Helen died like a woman,
  Nor told in Laconia that sickness killed her.
  
  Strike swords, blade on blade, the daughter of God
  Hangs like a lamp, high in the dark, quivering and white.
  
  The breasts are thrust forward and the head bows, the fleece of gold
  Shakes on the straining shoulders, writhes to the long white thighs.
  
  When God looked down from heaven the mound in the Troad
  Swarmed like an anthill, what spears are those?
  
  Power that will pierce your people, God of the living,
  The warrior-ants of the anthill, the spears from the dark barrow
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Torches are being brought from the house.
  
  Look under the torches, Oh King, that flare in the wind of night,
  Look under the torches.
  
  No Dorians are we; they planted strange seed in Asia who buried
  Achilles,
  Power to pierce death, helmeted heads cracking the grass-roots,
  Power to be born again.
  
  Come down and behold us Oh King of heaven and Oh hawks of
  Caucasus
  Come down and behold us,
  You African lions in the tawny wilderness roar in the storm,
  For our master is joined with the beauty he remembered in
  death, with the splendor of the earth,
  While the King of Laconia howls like a starved dog
  In the rain, in the violet lightnings, in the gaps of night, and we
  hold the gates.
  
  Polyxo comes between torch-bearers to exult.
  
  POLYXO
  High violent wind let the tree stand, leave me my vengeance.
  
  Slaves, hold the flaring torches up high;
  I can see a hanging whiteness in the wind and smoke.
  
  She ought
  to be hideous now?
  
  How beautiful she is.
  
  Hair veils the face.
  
  Where is my triumph?
  
  I am very happy.
  
  The high wind swings her slowly spinning
  As if to show all her beauty.
  
  I did not wantonly, Oh beautiful
  woman; my need compelled me.
  
  I have done
  More than I dared; I have put my pain outside me; it is time to
  exult.
  
  White mountains, ice-helmeted peaks
  That wall the ends of the world, come here and behold my
  triumph.
  
  Where is my triumph, has the wind snatched it?
  
  There is no woman on earth so happy as I am, having slain my
  pain: yet it seems that all present things
  Slip away down hill, and I could weep for them.
  
  CALCHO   (coming behind her in the darkness and confusion)
  Old woman,
  revenge is a slippery fish.
  
  This from Calcho.
  
  He drives the trident into her side, and tries to escape.
  
  One
  of the guard strikes him doivn.
  
  Polyxo has groaned and fallen
  on the steps.
  
  THE MYRMIDONS   (who have not ceased from their pacing dance)
  Roar in the night, storm, like a lion, spare not the stars.
  
  They have planted wild seed in the air who lifted God's
  Daughter on high, wavering aloft, blessing the new
  Age at birth with the beauty of her body .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  POLYXO   (slowly, gasping)
  Three spears?
  
  that fish-spear ah, ah, like a shark or tunny.
  
  Drag .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the points, black man, the barbed points, out.
  
  Ah.
  
  Ah.
  
  Ah.
  
  No.
  
  Their claws catch in my entrails; her death was
  kinder.
  
  What whiteness
  Wavers up there over fires and anguish?
  
  Rhodes: I have no son .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  THE MYRMIDONS   (turning and going back by the way they came)
  All is accomplished.
  
  Islanders, gather the slain.
  
  Seed has been planted in Asia, seed in Therapnae,
  High in the dark, seed for the white eagles of dawn.
  
  For us the black ship on the shore, for us the black waters, the black
  Hollow of the mound.
  
  Heavily beat, bronze upon bronze.
  
  Clash, bronze; beat, shields; beauty is new-born.
  
  The flame is blown from the torches by the violent wind.

• Autumn Evening Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Though the little clouds ran southward still, the quiet autumnal
  Cool of the late September evening
  Seemed promising rain, rain, the change of the year, the angel
  Of the sad forest.
  
  A heron flew over
  With that remote ridiculous cry, "Quawk," the cry
  That seems to make silence more silent.
  
  A dozen
  Flops of the wing, a drooping glide, at the end of the glide
  The cry, and a dozen flops of the wing.
  
  I watched him pass on the autumn-colored sky; beyond him
  Jupiter shone for evening star.
  
  The sea's voice worked into my mood, I thought "No matter
  What happens to men .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the world's well made though.
  
  "

• Ave Caesar Read Poem Log in to favourite

  No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
  
  They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.
  
  Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
  
  Or rather—for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists—
  Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep
  Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,
  We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
  Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.

• Be Angry At The Sun Read Poem Log in to favourite

  That public men publish falsehoods
  Is nothing new.
  
  That America must accept
  Like the historical republics corruption and empire
  Has been known for years.
  
  Be angry at the sun for setting
  If these things anger you.
  
  Watch the wheel slope and turn,
  They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
  
  This republic, Europe, Asia.
  
  Observe them gesticulating,
  Observe them going down.
  
  The gang serves lies, the passionate
  Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
  Hunts in no pack.
  
  You are not Catullus, you know,
  To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar.
  
  You are far
  From Dante's feet, but even farther from his dirty
  Political hatreds.
  
  Let boys want pleasure, and men
  Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
  And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
  
  Yours is not theirs.
  
  Anonymous submission.

• Birds Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The fierce musical cries of a couple of sparrowhawks hunting
  on the headland,
  Hovering and darting, their heads northwestward,
  Prick like silver arrows shot through a curtain the noise of the
  ocean
  Trampling its granite; their red backs gleam
  Under my window around the stone corners; nothing gracefuller,
  nothing
  Nimbler in the wind.
  
  Westward the wave-gleaners,
  The old gray sea-going gulls are gathered together, the northwest
  wind wakening
  Their wings to the wild spirals of the wind-dance.
  
  Fresh as the air, salt as the foam, play birds in the bright wind,
  fly falcons
  Forgetting the oak and the pinewood, come gulls
  From the Carmel sands and the sands at the river-mouth, from
  Lobos and out of the limitless
  Power of the mass of the sea, for a poem
  Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters,
  musically clamorous
  Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly
  Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed
  beaks, from the sharp
  Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.

• Birth-Dues Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely
  contemptible, the dangled
  Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice;
  But limitary pain — the rock under the tower
  and the hewn coping
  That takes thunder at the head of the turret-
  Terrible and real.
  
  Therefore a mindless dervish
  carving himself
  With knives will seem to have conquered the world.
  
  The world's God is treacherous and full of
  unreason; a torturer, but also
  The only foundation and the only fountain.
  
  Who fights him eats his own flesh and perishes
  of hunger; who hides in the grave
  To escape him is dead; who enters the Indian
  Recession to escape him is dead; who falls in
  love with the God is washed clean
  Of death desired and of death dreaded.
  
  He has joy, but Joy is a trick in the air; and
  pleasure, but pleasure is contemptible;
  And peace; and is based on solider than pain.
  
  He has broken boundaries a little and that will
  estrange him; he is monstrous, but not
  To the measure of the God….
  
  But I having told
  you—
  However I suppose that few in the world have
  energy to hear effectively-
  Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the
  people.

• Birthday (Autobiography) Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Seventy years ago my mother labored to bear me,
  A twelve-pound baby with a big head,
  Her first, it was plain torture.
  
  Finally they used the forceps
  And dragged me out, with one prong
  In my right eye, and slapped and banged me until I breathed.
  
  I am not particularly grateful for it.
  
  As to the eye: it remained invalid and now has a cataract.
  
  It can see gods and spirits in its cloud,
  And the weird end of the world: the left one's for common daylight.
  
  As to my mother:
  A rather beautiful young woman married to a grim clergyman
  Twenty-two years older than she:
  She had her little innocent diversions, her little travels in Europe—
  And once for scandal kissed the Pope's ring—
  Perhaps her life was no emptier than other lives.
  
  Both parents
  Swim in my blood and distort my thought but the old man's welcome.

• Bixby's Landing Read Poem Log in to favourite

  They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down
  here in an iron car
  On a long cable; here the ships warped in
  And took their loads from the engine, the water
  is deep to the cliff.
  
  The car
  Hangs half way over in the gape of the gorge,
  Stationed like a north star above the peaks of
  the redwoods, iron perch
  For the little red hawks when they cease from
  hovering
  When they've struck prey; the spider's fling of a
  cable rust-glued to the pulleys.
  
  The laborers are gone, but what a good multitude
  Is here in return: the rich-lichened rock, the
  rose-tipped stone-crop, the constant
  Ocean's voices, the cloud-lighted space.
  
  The kilns are cold on the hill but here in the
  rust of the broken boiler
  Quick lizards lighten, and a rattle-snake flows
  Down the cracked masonry, over the crumbled
  fire-brick.
  
  In the rotting timbers
  And roofless platforms all the free companies
  Of windy grasses have root and make seed; wild
  buckwheat blooms in the fat
  Weather-slacked lime from the bursted barrels.
  
  Two duckhawks darting in the sky of their cliff-hung
  nest are the voice of the headland.
  
  Wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness,
  Men's failures are often as beautiful as men's
  triumphs, but your returnings
  Are even more precious than your first presence.

• Blind Horses Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The proletariat for your Messiah, the poor and many are to
  seize power and make the world new.
  
  They cannot even conduct a strike without cunning leaders: if
  they make a revolution their leaders
  Must take the power.
  
  The first duty of men in power: to defend
  their power.
  
  What men defend
  To-day they will love to-morrow; it becomes theirs, their property.
  
  Lenin has served the revolution,
  Stalin presently begins to betray it.
  
  Why?
  
  For the sake of power,
  the Party's power, the state's
  Power, armed power, Stalin's power, Caesarean power.
  
  This is
  not quite a new world.
  
  The old shepherd has been known before; great and progressive
  empires have flourished before; powerful bureaucracies
  Apportioned food and labor and amusement; men have been
  massed and moulded, spies have gone here and there,
  The old shepherd Caesar his vicious collies, watching the flock.
  
  Inevitable?
  
  Perhaps, but not new.
  
  The ages like blind horses turning a mill tread their own hoofmarks.
  
  Whose corn's ground in that mill?

• Boats In A Fog Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
  The exuberant voices of music,
  Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
  That makes beauty; the mind
  Knows, grown adult.
  
  A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
  A throbbing of engines moved in it,
  At length, a stone's throw out, between the rocks and the vapor,
  One by one moved shadows
  Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing each other
  Following the cliff for guidance,
  Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-fog
  And the foam on the shore granite.
  
  One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me,
  Out of the vapor and into it,
  The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient and
  cautious,
  Coasting all round the peninsula
  Back to the buoys in Monterey harbor.
  
  A flight of pelicans
  Is nothing lovelier to look at;
  The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue
  Against the essential reality
  Of creatures going about their business among the equally
  Earnest elements of nature.

• Carmel Point Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The extraordinary patience of things!
  This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses-
  How beautiful when we first beheld it,
  Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
  No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
  Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
  Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
  
  Not faintly.
  
  It has all time.
  
  It knows the people are a tide
  That swells and in time will ebb, and all
  Their works dissolve.
  
  Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
  Lives in the very grain of the granite,
  Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.
  
  -As for us:
  We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
  We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
  As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

• Cassandra Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers
  Hooked in the stones of the wall,
  The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra,
  Whether the people believe
  Your bitter fountain?
  
  Truly men hate the truth, they'd liefer
  Meet a tiger on the road.
  
  Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion—
  Vendors and political men
  Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind
  Wisdom.
  
  Poor bitch be wise.
  
  No: you'll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men
  And gods disgusting—you and I, Cassandra.

• Contemplation Of The Sword Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
  
  The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
  formerly used to kill men, but here
  In the sense of a symbol.
  
  The sword: that is: the storms
  and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
  of men,
  Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
  less intentional, of children and women;
  Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
  the innocent air
  Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
  
  The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
  baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
  
  The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
  mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
  That starred man's forehead.
  
  Tyranny for freedom, horror for
  happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
  
  Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
  
  Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred
  stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries
  And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this
  thing comes near us again I am finding it hard
  To praise you with a whole heart.
  
  I know what pain is, but pain can shine.
  
  I know what death is,
  I have sometimes
  Longed for it.
  
  But cruelty and slavery and degradation,
  pestilence, filth, the pitifulness
  Of men like hurt little birds and animals .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  if you were
  only
  Waves beating rock, the wind and the iron-cored earth,
  With what a heart I could praise your beauty.
  
  You will not repent, nor cancel life, nor free man from anguish
  For many ages to come.
  
  You are the one that tortures himself to
  discover himself: I am
  One that watches you and discovers you, and praises you in little
  parables, idyl or tragedy, beautiful
  Intolerable God.
  
  The sword: that is:
  I have two sons whom I love.
  
  They are twins, they were born
  in nineteen sixteen, which seemed to us a dark year
  Of a great war, and they are now of the age
  That war prefers.
  
  The first-born is like his mother, he is so
  beautiful
  That persons I hardly know have stopped me on the street to
  speak of the grave beauty of the boy's face.
  
  The second-born has strength for his beauty; when he strips
  for swimming the hero shoulders and wrestler loins
  Make him seem clothed.
  
  The sword: that is: loathsome disfigurements,
  blindness, mutilation, locked lips of boys
  Too proud to scream.
  
  Reason will not decide at last: the sword will decide.

• Continent's End Read Poem Log in to favourite

  At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed
  with wet poppies, waiting spring,
  The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the
  ground-swell shook the beds of granite.
  
  I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established
  sea-marks, felt behind me
  Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before
  me the mass and doubled stretch of water.
  
  I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral
  sowings that flower the south,
  Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours that has
  followed the evening star.
  
  The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you
  have forgotten us, mother.
  
  You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and
  lay in the sun's eye on the tideline.
  
  It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and
  you have grown bitter; life retains
  Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the
  insolent quietness of stone.
  
  The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your
  child, but there is in me
  Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that
  watched before there was an ocean.
  
  That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin
  vapor and watched you change them,
  That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat
  rock, shift places with the continents.
  
  Mother, though my song's measure is like your surf-beat's ancient
  rhythm I never learned it of you.
  
  Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our
  tones flow from the older fountain.

• Contrast Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The world has many seas, Mediterranean, Atlantic, but
  here is the shore of the one ocean.
  
  And here the heavy future hangs like a cloud; the
  enormous scene; the enormous games preparing
  Weigh on the water and strain the rock; the stage is
  here, the play is conceived; the players are
  not found.
  
  I saw on the Sierras, up the Kaweah valley above the
  Moro rock, the mountain redwoods
  Like red towers on the slopes of snow; about their
  bases grew a bushery of Christmas green,
  Firs and pines to be monuments for pilgrimage
  In Europe; I remembered the Swiss forests, the dark
  robes of Pilatus, no trunk like these there;
  But these are underwood; they are only a shrubbery
  about the boles of the trees.
  
  Our people are clever and masterful;
  They have powers in the mass, they accomplish marvels.
  
  It is possible Time will make them before it
  annuls them, but at present
  There is not one memorable person, there is not one
  mind to stand with the trees, one life with
  the mountains.

• Crumbs Or The Loaf Read Poem Log in to favourite

  If one should tell them what's clearly seen
  They'd not understand; if they understood they would not believe;
  If they understood and believed they'd say,
  "Hater of men, annihilating with a sterile enormous
  Splendor our lives: where are our lives?
  
  "
  A little chilled perhaps, but not hurt.
  
  But it's quite true
  The invulnerable love is not bought for nothing.
  
  It is better no doubt to give crumbs than the loaf; make fables again,
  Tell people not to fear death, toughen
  Their bones if possible with bitter fables not to fear life.
  
  And one's own, not to have pity too much;
  For it seems compassion sacks longer than the other colors, in
  this bleaching cloth.

• Curb Science? Read Poem Log in to favourite

  SCIENCE, that gives man hope to live without lies
  Or blast himself off the earth :---curb science
  Until morality catches up?
  
  ---But look : morality
  At present running rapidly retrograde,
  You'd have to turn science too, back to the witch-doctors
  And myth-drunkards.
  
  Besides that morality
  Is not an end in itself : truth is an end.
  
  To seek the truth is better than good works, better than survival,
  Holier than innocence and higher than love.

• De Rerum Virtute Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I.
  
  Here is the skull of a man: a man’s thoughts and emotions
  Have moved under the thin bone vault like clouds
  Under the blue one: love and desire and pain,
  Thunderclouds of wrath and white gales of fear
  Have hung inside here: and sometimes the curious desire of knowing
  Values and purpose and the causes of things
  Has coasted like a little observer air-plane over the images
  That filled this mind: it never discovered much,
  And now all’s empty, a bone bubble, a blown-out eggshell.
  
  II.
  
  That’s what it’s like: for the egg too has a mind,
  Doing what our able chemists will never do,
  Building the body of a hatchling, choosing among the proteins:
  These for the young wing-muscles, these for the great
  Crystalline eyes, these for the flighty nerves and brain:
  Choosing and forming: a limited but superhuman intelligence,
  Prophetic of the future and aware of the past:
  The hawk’s egg will make a hawk, and the serpent’s
  A gliding serpent: but each with a little difference
  From its ancestors—and slowly, if it works, the race
  Forms a new race: that also is a part of the plan
  Within the egg.
  
  I believe the first living cell
  Had echoes of the future in it, and felt
  Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest
  And whale’s-track sea; I believe this globed earth
  Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods,
  But feels and chooses.
  
  And the Galaxy, the firewheel
  On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is one dust-grain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe
  Is not blind force, but fulfils its life and intends its courses.
  
  “All things are full of God.
  
  Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God.
  
  ”
  III.
  
  Thus the thing stands; the labor and the games go on—
  What for?
  
  What for?
  
  —Am I a God that I should know?
  
  Men live in peace and happiness; men live in horror
  And die howling.
  
  Do you think the blithe sun
  Is ignorant that black waste and beggarly blindness trail him like hounds,
  And will have him at last?
  
  He will be strangled
  Among his dead satellites, remembering magnificence.
  
  IV.
  
  I stand on the cliff at Sovranes creek-mouth.
  
  Westward beyond the raging water and the bent shoulder of the world
  The bitter futile war in Korea proceeds, like an idiot
  Prophesying.
  
  It is too hot in mind
  For anyone, except God perhaps, to see beauty in it.
  
  Indeed it is hard to see beauty
  In any of the acts of man: but that means the acts of a sick microbe
  On a satellite of a dust-grain twirled in a whirlwind
  In the world of stars .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Something perhaps may come of him; in any event
  He can’t last long.
  
  —Well: I am short of patience
  Since my wife died .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and this era of spite and hate-filled half-worlds
  Gets to the bone.
  
  I believe that man too is beautiful,
  But it is hard to see, and wrapped up in falsehoods.
  
  Michael Angelo and the Greek sculptors—
  How they flattered the race! Homer and Shakespeare—
  How they flattered the race!
  V.
  
  One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men;
  The immense beauty of the world, not the human world.
  
  Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly
  At the mountains and sea.
  
  Are they not beautiful?
  
  These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks
  Stopping the sombre stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean?
  
  Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore,
  With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions
  Couching on them.
  
  Look at the gulls on the cliff wind,
  And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream—
  But in the sage-brush desert, all one sun-stricken
  Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest,
  Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice—is the earth not beautiful?
  
  Nor the great skies over the earth?
  
  The beauty of things means virtue and value in them.
  
  It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world?
  
  Certainly.
  
  It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman
  Intrinsic glory.
  
  It means that the world is sound,
  Whatever the sick microbe does.
  
  But he too is part of it.

• Decaying Lambskins Read Poem Log in to favourite

  After all, we also stand on a height.
  
  Our blood and our culture
  have passed the flood-marks of any world
  Up to this time.
  
  Our engineers have nothing to learn from Rome's,
  Egypt's, China's, and could teach them more
  Than ever their myth-makers imagined.
  
  Our science, however
  confused, personal and fabulous, can hardly
  Lean low enough, sun-blinded eagle, to laugh at the strange
  astronomies of Babylon, or at Lucretius
  His childish dreams of origins, or Plato's
  Lunatic swan.
  
  While as for our means and mastery of warfare, at
  sea, on land, in the air .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  So boastful?
  
  Because we are not proud but wearily ashamed of this peak of
  time.
  
  What is noble in us, to kindle
  The imagination of a future age?
  
  We shall seem a race of cheap
  Fausts, vulgar magicians.
  
  What men have we to show them?
  
  but inventions and appliances.
  
  Not men but populations, mass-men; not life
  But amusements; not health but medicines.
  
  And the odor: what
  is that odor?
  
  Decaying lambskins: the Christian
  Ideals that for protection and warmth our naked ancestors .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  but naturally, after nineteen centuries .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  O Mort, vieux capitaine, est-il temps, nous levons Tancre?
  
  It is perhaps
  Time, almost time, to let our supreme inventions begin to work.
  
  The exact intelligent guns
  Can almost wheel themselves into action of their own accord, and
  almost calculate their own trajectories.
  
  The clever battleships know their objectives; the huge bombing-planes
  and meteor pursuit-planes are all poised for .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what?
  
  Vanity.
  
  This also is vanity; horrible too, but a vain dream.
  
  Our civilization, the worst it can do, cannot yet destroy itself;
  but only deep-wounded drag on for centuries.

• Delusion Of Saints Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The old pagan burials, uninscribed rock,
  Secret-keeping mounds,
  Have shed the feeble delusions that built them,
  They stand inhumanly
  Clean and massive; they have lost their priests.
  
  But the cross-bearing stones
  Still foot corruption, and their faces carved
  With hopes and terrors
  At length too savagely annulled to be left
  Even ridiculous.
  
  Long-suffering saints, flamelike aspirers,
  You have won your reward:
  You sleep now as easily as any dead murderer
  Or worn-out lecher.
  
  To have found your faith a liar is no thorn
  In the narrow beds,
  Nor laughter of unfriends nor rumor of the ruinous
  Churches will reach you.
  
  As at Clonmacnoise I saw them all ruined,
  And at Cong, at Glendalough,
  At Monasterboice; and at Kilrnacduagh
  All ruined, all roofless
  But the great cyclopean-stoned spire
  That leans toward its fall.
  
  A place perfectly abandoned of life,
  Except that we heard
  One old horse neighing across the stone hedges
  In the flooded fields.

• Distant Rainfall Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Like mourning women veiled to the feet
  Tall slender rainstorms walk slowly against gray cloud along the
  far verge.
  
  The ocean is green where the river empties,
  Dull gray between the points of the headlands, purple where
  the women walk.
  
  What do they want?
  
  Whom are they mourning?
  
  What hero's dust in the urn between the two hands hidden in
  the veil?
  
  Titaness after Titaness proudly
  Bearing her tender magnificent sorrow at her heart, the lost
  battle's beauty.

• Divinely Superfluous Beauty Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,
  Over and under the ocean…
  Divinely superfluous beauty
  Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow
  And hills tower, waves fall.
  
  The incredible beauty of joy
  Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too
  Be joined, there is not a maiden
  Burns and thirsts for love
  More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings
  Weave like a web in the air
  Divinely superfluous beauty.

• End Of The World Read Poem Log in to favourite

  When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
  We used to take it for known that the human race
  Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died.
  
  I wrote a schoolboy poem
  About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
  Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
  His racial past.
  
  But now I don't think so.
  
  They'll die faceless in flocks,
  And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.

• Evening Ebb Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five nightherons
  Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of the air
  Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings.
  
  The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down
  From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises.
  
  The
  ebb whispers.
  
  Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water.
  
  Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams, and the
  evening
  Star suddenly glides like a flying torch.
  
  As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind
  The screen of the world for another audience.

• Fawn's Foster-Mother Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels
  With her meagre pale demoralized daughter.
  
  Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun
  And saying that when she was first married
  She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.
  
  (It is empty now, the roof has fallen
  But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods
  Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing;
  The place is now more solitary than ever before.
  
  )
  "When I was nursing my second baby
  My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake
  And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast
  Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.
  
  Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,
  Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.
  
  I had more joy from that than from the others.
  
  "
  Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road
  With market-wagons, mean cares and decay.
  
  She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin
  Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows,
  I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,
  The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.

• Fire On The Hills Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The deer were bounding like blown leaves
  Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
  I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
  
  Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
  Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
  Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
  Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
  Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
  He had come from far off for the good hunting
  With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
  Blue, and the hills merciless black,
  The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
  
  I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
  The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.

• Flight Of Swans Read Poem Log in to favourite

  One who sees giant Orion, the torches of winter midnight,
  Enormously walking above the ocean in the west of heaven;
  And watches the track of this age of time at its peak of flight
  Waver like a spent rocket, wavering toward new discoveries,
  Mortal examinations of darkness, soundings of depth;
  And watches the long coast mountain vibrate from bronze to green,
  Bronze to green, year after year, and all the streams
  Dry and flooded, dry and flooded, in the racing seasons;
  And knows that exactly this and not another is the world,
  The ideal is phantoms for bait, the spirit is a flicker on a grave;
  May serve, with a certain detachment, the fugitive human race,
  Or his own people, or his own household; but hardly himself;
  And will not wind himself into hopes nor sicken with despairs.
  
  He has found the peace and adored the God; he handles in autumn
  The germs of far-future spring.
  
  Sad sons of the stormy fall,
  No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you
  To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside,
  Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds,
  Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain,
  But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.

• Fog Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Invisible gulls with human voices cry in the sea-cloud
  "There is room, wild minds,
  Up high in the cloud; the web and the feather remember
  Three elements, but here
  Is but one, and the webs and the feathers
  Subduing but the one
  Are the greater, with strength and to spare.
  
  " You dream, wild
  criers,
  The peace that all life
  Dreams gluttonously, the infinite self that has eaten
  Environment, and lives
  Alone, unencroached on, perfectly gorged, one God.
  
  Caesar and Napoleon
  Visibly acting their dream of that solitude, Christ and Gautama,
  Being God, devouring
  The world with atonement for God's sake .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ah sacred hungers,
  The conqueror's, the prophet's,
  The lover's, the hunger of the sea-beaks, slaves of the last peace,
  Worshippers of oneness.

• from The Women At Point Sur Read Poem Log in to favourite

  XII
  Here were new idols again to praise him;
  I made them alive; but when they looked up at the face before
  they had seen it they were drunken and fell down.
  
  I have seen and not fallen, I am stronger than the idols,
  But my tongue is stone how could I speak him?
  
  My blood in my
  veins is seawater how could it catch fire?
  
  The rock shining dark rays and the rounded
  Crystal the ocean his beam of blackness and silence
  Edged with azure, bordered with voices;
  The moon her brittle tranquillity; the great phantoms, the fountains
  of light, the seed of the sky,
  Their plaintive splendors whistling to each other:
  There is nothing but shines though it shine darkness; nothing but
  answers; they are caught in the net of their voices
  Though the voices be silence; they are woven in the nerve-warp.
  
  One people, the stars and the people, one structure; the voids
  between stars, the voids between atoms, and the vacancy
  In the atom in the rings of the spinning demons,
  Are full of that weaving; one emptiness, one presence: who had
  watched all his splendor
  Had known but a little: all his night, but a little.
  
  I made glass puppets to speak of him, they splintered in my hand
  and have cut me, they are heavy with my blood.
  
  But the jewel-eyed herons have never beheld him
  Nor heard; nor the tall owl with cat's ears, the bittern in the
  willows, the squid in the rock in the silence of the ocean,
  The vulture that broods in the pitch of the blue
  And sees the earth globed, her edges dripping into rainbow twilights:
  eyed hungers, blind fragments: I sometime
  Shall fashion images great enough to face him
  A moment and speak while they die.
  
  These here have gone mad:
  but stammer the tragedy you crackled vessels.

• Ghost Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Above the gray-mouthed Pacific, cottages and a thick-walled tower, all made of rough sea rock
  And Portland cement.
  
  I imagine, fifty years from now,
  A mist-gray figure moping about this place in mad moonlight, examining the mortar-joints, pawing the
  Parasite ivy: "Does the place stand?
  
  How did it take that last earthquake?
  
  " Then someone comes
  From the house-door, taking a poodle for his bedtime walk.
  
  The dog snarls and retreats; the man
  Stands rigid, saying "Who are you?
  
  What are you doing here?
  
  " "Nothing to hurt you," it answers, "I am just looking
  At the walls that I built.
  
  I see that you have played hell
  With the trees that I planted.
  
  " "There has to be room for people," he answers.
  
  "My God," he says, "That still!"

• Ghosts In England Read Poem Log in to favourite

  At East Lulworth the dead were friendly and pitiful, I saw them
  peek from their ancient earthworks on the coast hills
  At the camps of the living men in the valley, the army-mechanics'
  barracks, the roads where they try the tanks
  And the armored cars: "We also," they say, "trembled in our
  time.
  
  We felt the world change in the rain,
  Our people like yours were falling under the wheel.
  
  Great
  past and declining present are a pitiful burden
  For living men; but failure is not the worm that worries
  the dead, you will not weep when you come,"
  Said the soft mournful shadows on the Dorset shore.
  
  And those
  on the Rollright ridge by the time-eaten stone-circle
  Said nothing and had no wish in the world, having blessedly aged
  out of humanity, stared with great eyes
  White as the hollowed limestone, not caring but seeing, inhuman
  as the wind.
  
  But the other ghosts were not good,
  But like a moon of jackals around a sick stag.
  
  At Zennor in the tumbled granite chaos, at Marazion and the
  angel's Mount, from the hoar tide-lines:
  "Be patient, dead men, the tides of their day have turned," from
  the stone rings of the dead huts on Dartmoor,
  The prison town like a stain of dirt on the distant hill: "We not
  the last," they said, "shall be hopeless,
  We not alone hunger in the rain.
  
  " From Avebury in the high
  heart of England, in the ancient temple,
  When all the cottages darkened themselves to sleep: "Send it
  along the ridge-ways and say it on the hilltops
  That the bone is broken and the meat will fall.
  
  "
  There was also a
  ghost of a king, his cheeks hollow as the brows
  Of an old horse, was paddling his hands in the reeds of Dozmare
  Pool, in the shallow, in the rainy twilight,
  Feeling for the hilt of a ruinous and rusted sword.
  
  But they said
  "Be patient a little, you king of shadows,
  But only wait, they will waste like snow.
  
  " Then Arthur left
  hunting for the lost sword, he grinned and stood up
  Gaunt as a wolf; but soon resumed the old labor, shaking the
  reeds with his hands.
  
  Northeastward to Wantage
  On the chalk downs the Saxon Alfred
  Witlessly walks with his hands lamenting.
  
  "Who are the people
  and who are the enemy?
  
  " He says bewildered,
  "Who are the living, who are the dead?
  
  " The more ancient dead
  Watch him from the wide earthworks on White Horse Hill,
  peer from the Ridgeway barrows, goggle from the broken
  Mound and the scattered stones in the oval wood above Ashbury.
  
  They whisper and exult.
  
  In the north also
  I saw them, from the Picts' houses in the black Caithness heather
  to the bleak stones on Culloden Moor,
  The rags of lost races and beaten clans, nudging each other, the
  blue lips cracking with joy, the fleshless
  Anticipatory fingers jabbing at the south.
  
  And on the Welsh
  borders
  Were dead men skipping and fleering behind all the hedges.
  
  An
  island of ghosts.
  
  They seemed merry, and to feel
  No pity for the great pillar of empire settling to a fall, the pride
  and the power slowly dissolving.

• Give Your Heart To The Hawks Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  The apples hung until a wind at the equinox,
  That heaped the beach with black weed, filled the dry grass
  Under the old trees with rosy fruit.
  
  In the morning Fayne Fraser gathered the sound ones into a basket,
  The bruised ones into a pan.
  
  One place they lay so thickly
  She knelt to reach them.
  
  Her husband's brother passing
  Along the broken fence of the stubble-field,
  His quick brown eyes took in one moving glance
  A little gopher-snake at his feet flowing through the stubble
  To gain the fence, and Fayne crouched after apples
  With her mop of red hair like a glowing coal
  Against the shadow in the garden.
  
  The small shapely reptile
  Flowed into a thicket of dead thistle-stalks
  Around a fence-post, but its tail was not hidden.
  
  The young man drew it all out, and as the coil
  Whipped over his wrist, smiled at it; he stepped carefully
  Across the sag of the wire.
  
  When Fayne looked up
  His hand was hidden; she looked over her shoulder
  And twitched her sunburnt lips from small white teeth
  To answer the spark of malice in his eyes, but turned
  To the apples, intent again.
  
  Michael looked down
  At her white neck, rarely touched by the sun,
  But now the cinnabar-colored hair fell off from it;
  And her shoulders in the light-blue shirt, and long legs like a boy's
  Bare-ankled in blue-jean trousers, the country wear;
  He stooped quietly and slipped the small cool snake
  Up the blue-denim leg.
  
  Fayne screamed and writhed,
  Clutching her thigh.
  
  "Michael, you beast.
  
  " She stood up
  And stroked her leg, with little sharp cries, the slender invader
  Fell down her ankle.
  
  Fayne snatched for it and missed;
  Michael stood by rejoicing, his rather small
  Finely cut features in a dance of delight;
  Fayne with one sweep flung at his face
  All the bruised and half-spoiled apples in the pan,
  A fragrant volley, and while he staggered under it,
  The hat fallen from his head, she found one thoroughly
  Soft-rotten, brown in the long white grass, and threw
  For the crown of his dark head but perfectly missed,
  Crying "Quits.
  
  We're even.
  
  " They stood and warily smiled at each other
  In the heavy-sweet apple air.
  
  The garden was sunken lower than
  the little fields; it had many fragrances
  And its own shadow, while the cows lay in the stream-bed, large
  sycamore leaves dropped on their flanks; the yellow
  Heads of the hills quivered with sun and the straining sea-glare.
  
  Fayne said, "Where did it go, poor thing?
  
  "
  Looking for the little serpent.
  
  Michael said gravely, "That's to
  remember me by.
  
  I wish I could do worse.
  
  I'm going away.
  
  " "What?
  
  " "From here again.
  
  "
  "Oh, no.
  
  " "I am, though.
  
  " "No, Michael.
  
  "
  "Freckles," he answered, "didn't it ever occur to you
  That it's fairly dull here?
  
  I'm going up to town again.
  
  I've got to earn money and spend it and hear the motors.
  
  "
  She said dismally, "What about me?
  
  Who'll there be to talk to?
  
  "
  "Lance, of course.
  
  " "I love him dearly; he's not fun exactly.
  
  He wouldn't stick a rattlesnake up my leg.
  
  "
  "Gopher-snake," he shouted.
  
  They stood and laughed at each
  other,
  And Michael: "I was over the ridge to Drunken Charlie's,
  Fixing up a little party for Saturday.
  
  There'll be a moon in the evening.
  
  I leave Monday.
  
  "
  Fayne said unhappily, "Help me pick up the apples
  I poured on you.
  
  "
  II
  Michael was taking Mary Abbey;
  The Dolmans came, and Will Howard with two girls,
  And Leo Ramirez with his sister Nell, so that the youth
  Of the coast was all there.
  
  They met at Erasers'
  And crossed the ridge; and were picketing the horses
  Where they could ride no farther, on the airy brink
  Above the great slides of the thousand-foot cliff.
  
  They were very gay, colorful mites on the edge of the world.
  
  The men divided the pack to carry;
  Lance Eraser, being strongest, took most.
  
  Far down below, the
  broad ocean burned like a vast cat's eye
  Pupilled by the track of sun; but eastward, beyond the white-grassed
  hump of the ridge, the day moon stood bleak
  And badly shaped, face of stained clay, above the limestone fang
  of one of the Ventana mountains
  Just its own color.
  
  Lance, looking back, saw his wife talking to
  Michael, her cinnabar-colored hair
  Like a flag of life against the pale east.
  
  That moment he saw the
  horses plunging against the sky
  And heard a noise like a sharp head of water from a narrow pipe;
  a girl cried out,
  Lance dropped his pack and returned.
  
  Will Howard was looking
  for stones
  But found none, but Lance found a burnt fence-post, relic of an
  ancient fire.
  
  The snake lay with raised head,
  The rattle of its tail making that noise of sharp water running; a
  big rattler, but very small
  At bay in the circle of the laughing men.
  
  Lance struck for its head,
  but the snake that moment struck at the rope's end
  That Michael was flicking at it, so that Lance's blow failed, the
  fence-post broke to bits in his hand,
  The snake not harmed; then Michael laughing with pleasure
  whipped the creature to death with the doubled rope
  And set his heel on the head; Lance damned all rotten wood, his
  blond face flushing
  Dark through the sunburn.
  
  Michael cut off the victim's
  Tail with the ten rattles to give to Mary;
  The other young men quieted the horses, and caught
  One that had dragged away the bush it was tied to.
  
  Lance would not wait, he picked up his pack and went
  Alone down the zigzag path; but after a moment
  His temper cleared.
  
  Far down, short of the cat's-eye ocean, they
  saw like a brown pebble
  Drunken Charlie's hut in a gorge of the cliff, a feather of smoke,
  and his boat like a split berry
  Of bladdery seaweed up the thin strand; and Lance stood waiting
  down the wild cliffside, his light-brown hair
  Golden with sun, his hat and the pack laid down.
  
  The warm wind
  up the mountain was wild with fragrance,
  Chiefly the scent of the chiya bushes, that wear rosettes of seed
  Strung on the stem.
  
  The girls squealed as they scrambled down,
  when the brittle trap-rock broke underfoot,
  Small fragments ran over on the next below.
  
  When they came to
  the foot of the cliff Michael said, "Now," and offered
  A bottle hot from his pocket.
  
  "It's time.
  
  " Mary Abbey refused
  it but the others drank, from mouth to mouth,
  Stinging fire from the slobbered bottle-neck.
  
  The sun was low
  But had played all day on this southwestward
  Cliff over the burning-glass water and the air
  Still swirled with heat; the headland of Eraser's Point
  Stopped off the trade-wind here.
  
  Fayne Fraser a little dizzily
  Looked seaward, left of the blazing sun-track, and saw the track
  of the northwest gale and the running waves
  Like an endless army of horse with banners going by offshore;
  her eyes followed them, a ruled line southward
  Of violent water, converging toward the bronze headland beyond
  headland of the mountain coast; and someone was saying,
  "It's hot, we'll swim.
  
  " "Before we eat," someone said.
  
  The girls twittered together and clustered northward
  To a little cove beyond a fair spit of rock;
  The men remained on this side.
  
  Fayne undressed beside Mary
  Abbey,
  And was careful of words, because she'd sucked from the bottle
  more than she meant to, and had small experience of drinking.
  
  She said carefully, "Where did those girls of Will Howard's
  come from?
  
  " "Nina told me," she answered; "waitresses
  Down from the city on their vacation.
  
  " "Honestly are they?
  
  I
  guessed it.
  
  " "No," Mary said, "they're nice girls.
  
  "
  "That yellow-haired one, she's bad.
  
  " "No," Mary said.
  
  Fayne
  said, "Did you see her face when she looked at Michael
  Across that bottle?
  
  " "Oh, no," Mary answered.
  
  ".
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Well.
  
  Are
  you ready, Mary?
  
  Let's go.
  
  "
  They limped down to the waves, giggling and wincing.
  
  Fayne had tied a broad handkerchief around her hair
  To shed the spray; she swam out farther than others,
  Mary remained along shore.
  
  The other side of the rock-spit
  The men had bathed, and had come up strand again
  To dry by the driftwood fire; all except Michael,
  Who loved to swim.
  
  Lance Fraser stood by the fire, his broad
  smooth chest, grooved between the square plates
  Of heavy muscle, steamed and was ruddy in the glowing heat.
  
  He
  narrowed his eyes to look seaward
  And saw Michael's left arm, over the speck of his head, lift, reach and dip,
  Swimming side-stroke; two white arms flashing swanlike on either
  side of a handkerchief-hooded head
  Emerged from the scales of light on the edge of the sun-dazzle.
  
  The swimmers approached each other,
  And met this side the long brown stain of the breathing kelp-bed.
  
  Lance frowned,
  But only thinking that they were too far out
  And making a show of themselves.
  
  On the pleasant water
  Michael had called to Fayne, "I've something for you.
  
  Come here a minute.
  
  " She hardly dared, and thought
  In the flashing joy of the sea, "Oh, the water covers us.
  
  What have you got?
  
  " "Gin for girls.
  
  We've got a fire on this side.
  
  " They met laughing,
  And reached the bottle from hand to hand and floated decorously
  Separate again.
  
  Fayne looked toward shore, and saw the vast
  cliff in the flare of sundown soaring above
  Like beaten gold, the imperfect moon-disk gold on its brow; the
  tiny distinct white shapes of men
  Around their spot of fire in the flat blue sea-shadow.
  
  She breathed
  hard and said,
  "My God, how beautiful.
  
  Oh, Michael, stay here at home.
  
  "
  He answered with a watery yell of pleasure, submerging his mouth
  To roar as the sea-lions do.
  
  Fayne trailed the bottle
  And swam ashore.
  
  There was nothing to dry herself with;
  The chill of the water had touched her blood, she sucked breath gustily
  Through clicking teeth.
  
  She sipped from the salted bottle,
  And dressed, but shivered still.
  
  She sunned herself by the fire,
  Watching with fascinated speculation of pain
  The antennae of lobsters like spikes of jointed grass
  Above the heating water in a five-gallon tin
  Writhe at the sky, lives unable to scream.
  
  III
  Under the vast calm vaulting glory of the afterglow, low smoky
  rose and delicately
  Stratified amber, soaring purple; then rose again, luminous and
  virginal, floating the moon,
  High up a scoured hollow of the cliff
  Cormorants were settling to roost on the jags and ledges.
  
  They writhed long Negro snake-throats and shot
  Sharp heads at each other, shaking out sooty wings
  And angry complaining cries.
  
  Below, on the thread of beach,
  The lonely fisherman who was called Drunken Charlie,
  Fire glowing on his drugged eyes, wide beard and lank hair,
  Turned meat on the grid over the barbecue-pit
  And talked to himself all the time.
  
  Michael Fraser knelt
  By a turned chest that served for table and poured
  From a jug into cups, fierce new distillate
  From Charlie's cliff-hidden kettle.
  
  Fayne Fraser shook half-dried hair,
  The color of the coals at the heart of the fire
  But darkening as light decreased, and went to Lance
  Who stood alone at the waves' edge, turning his back on the
  world, and the wet sand
  Raised by his weight on either side of his foot-soles ran water and
  glistened in the still light.
  
  Fayne said
  "Are you cross, dear?
  
  " She pushed up his rolled sleeve and clasped
  her fingers on the broad trunk of his arm
  Above the elbow, "Dear, are you sad?
  
  " "I?
  
  No," he said, "What
  about?
  
  " "You haven't spoken to anyone
  Since we were swimming.
  
  " "Why should I?
  
  You were out too
  far, though.
  
  " "Oh, I can swim.
  
  And Michael was there to help me if I'd got tired.
  
  " "By God, no,"
  Lance said, with a sharp vision in his mind
  Of her bright nakedness, the shining whiteness and the red hair.
  
  She understood and said softly, "Well,
  I didn't need help.
  
  But he's our brother.
  
  " "Certainly; I didn't
  mind him," he answered.
  
  "But I did hate
  To think that rabble of girls could look at you; it isn't decent.
  
  "
  She said, "They didn't seem interested.
  
  Come, drink and eat.
  
  Those waitress women are passing the paper
  plates.
  
  " He saw that vision once more,
  The form and whiteness, the little gay-colored flower of the
  pubic hair, and groaned, as a thick bull
  Alone in the field groans to himself, not knowing why the hot
  brow and the hooves itch for destruction.
  
  Fayne to cure his unhappiness hasted and returned
  Fetching two cups of the fire Michael was pouring.
  
  After they had
  eaten, twilight and moonlight came;
  The fire burned smaller and brighter; they were twelve around
  it; and drinks were poured.
  
  The bearded fisherman seemed
  Stiffly asleep, with open eyes like a drowned man's
  Glazed by the yellow firelight.
  
  Tom Dolman and Leo Ramirez
  Roughed at each other, and Nina Dolman
  Sitting between them cried out; then Michael said,
  "Get up and wrestle.
  
  " All but the fisherman turned
  To watch them circle clumsily on the damp sand
  And suddenly lock, into one quadruped body reeling
  Against the dark band of ocean and the low sky.
  
  Ramirez had the low hold but Dolman was the heavier man;
  They tugged and sobbed; Ramirez was lifted high
  And writhed on the other's shoulder by the evening star,
  But the strained column staggered and crumbled, the Spaniard
  Fell uppermost and was the first to rise up.
  
  Michael asked very gravely, "Who was the winner?
  
  The winner may challenge Lance.
  
  " Ramirez gasping and laughing
  Said, "Drunk; not to that extent.
  
  " "Then gather firewood.
  
  The fire's got low.
  
  "
  The yellow-haired one of the two girls Will Howard had brought
  Sat in the sand beside Lance Fraser; she leaned on his shoulder
  and held a cup to his mouth and said
  "Please drink it for me: things are beginning to go 'round in
  circles.
  
  " He drank; then Fayne on his other side
  Grew suddenly cool and quite clear; she leaned across him and
  said, "That hair in the cup! Well, you drank it.
  
  Her bleaches have made it brittle so it keeps falling.
  
  " "Oh," the
  other gasped, "that's not true.
  
  " "It's pretty," Fayne said,
  "Only the black half inch at the roots.
  
  Is your name Lois?
  
  What's
  your name?
  
  " "Lois.
  
  " "Lean the other way,
  Lois.
  
  " Then Lance said angrily, "Be quiet, will you," and got up
  To fetch more firewood.
  
  A timber from one of the four ships
  That have broken in half a century off Fraser's Point
  Lay near and dry; Ramirez and Howard had brought it,
  But the axe was lost in the sand.
  
  Lance up-ended it,
  An ivory-white pillar under the moon,
  Garnished with great iron bolts.
  
  He wedged his fingers
  Into a crack and suddenly straining tore it in two;
  The splitting made a great noise under the cliff,
  The sea being quiet.
  
  Lance felt himself curiously
  Numbed, as if the sharp effort had strained the whiskey
  Out of his blood through the sheathes of his nerves;
  His body obeyed as ever but felt a distance
  Blocked off and alien.
  
  He took the halves of the timber
  Under each arm and a bolt in his hand,
  For two or three had fallen out of the wood,
  This one straight, long and heavy.
  
  After he had laid
  His logs on the fire he saw the fisherman's
  Firelight-discolored eyes, and called "Hey! Charlie.
  
  "
  Still the man slept.
  
  Lance, wavering a little, reached
  Over Will Howard's shoulder and took the cup from his hand,
  Drank half, poured the other half on Charlie's long hair;
  It dribbled into his beard; he coughed and awoke.
  
  Lance said "D'you ever have rattlesnakes down here?
  
  I snicked at one up the cliff with a rotten stick;
  But this'd fix 'em.
  
  " He gave him the iron bar;
  Charlie posted it carefully up in the sand
  Between his feet and answered, "Mm; but there's Injuns.
  
  "
  "What?
  
  " "All that was cleared out of the country.
  
  Where did you think they got to?
  
  They ain't got ships.
  
  Down here they are.
  
  " The dark-haired girl that Will Howard
  had brought
  Suddenly stood up from the fire, she went toward the sea and
  was heard vomiting.
  
  Charlie nodded and said,
  "There's one o' them now.
  
  Most nights I see their fires away
  down the beach.
  
  " Mary Abbey whispered to Michael,
  "Don't take any more.
  
  Time to go home.
  
  " "Ah no," he said,
  "dear, we just got here.
  
  " Fayne came to Lance
  And said, "Don't drink any more.
  
  Time to go home.
  
  " He answered
  briskly, "Since when are you giving orders?
  
  "
  "Since you're not fit to.
  
  " She knew while the words made in her
  throat, "Now he'll be angry," a pale rush of anger
  Ran to meet his; the memory of all his bad-tempered times, his
  heavy earnestness and lack of laughter,
  Pierced like a mountain-peak the cloud in her mind, "Oh, I do
  hate you.
  
  "
  He stared, more astonished than angry, and saw her face
  Lean, sharp, bled white, each freckle black as a mole
  Against its moon-gleam pallor.
  
  "That's how you feel, ah?
  
  "
  He turned his back.
  
  She thought, "He'll never forgive me:
  Let him not," and saw the Dolmans, Nina and Tom,
  Seeking the way up the cliff, Mary Abbey with them,
  Fayne went and said, "Michael, I've lost my cup,
  Aren't there any more cups?
  
  " "I'll hold the jug:
  You hold your mouth.
  
  " "Oo, I need water with it.
  
  "
  "No, you don't.
  
  " Half of the sip went strangling
  Into her throat, half ran by her little chin
  And trickled between her breasts.
  
  She looked at the fire,
  Then at the moon, both blurred fantastically,
  Red burrowed, white wavered high.
  
  Michael said, "My girl's
  gone.
  
  "
  Fayne said, "Oh, and yours?
  
  " He said "That's no sense.
  
  That's very.
  
  "
  She laughed and answered, "They don't.
  
  "
  The moon suspended
  in her great antelope-leap from the head of the cliff
  Hung pouring whiteness along the narrow runway of sand and
  slide-rock under the continent's foot,
  A watery glittering and secret place, walled from the world,
  closed by the cliff, ditched by the ocean.
  
  Drunken Charlie dreamed by the dying fire;
  Will Howard and Nell Ramirez were one slight point
  Far down the white beach.
  
  Yellow-haired Lois
  Spilled her drink and said, "Seeing is believing.
  
  Come on, I'll show you.
  
  " She smiled at Lance, "Come, dear.
  
  Sadie's passed out; it's all right wi' Sadie,"
  And to Leo Ramirez, "Come if you like, dark boy.
  
  "
  He swayed and stammered, "Responsible; Sister Nell.
  
  Keep an eye on young sister.
  
  " "Ah, go and find her.
  
  "
  "Not till I see the picture on Sadie's stomach.
  
  "
  They wandered toward Drunken Charlie's little hollow skiff
  And its black shadow, drawn up the moonlight strand.
  
  Lance thought, "Here's a boat, let's break it," and thought with
  an ache of shame,
  "I wouldn't think that, only being drunk.
  
  " The center of his
  mind made savage war on rebellious out-liers
  In breathless darkness behind the sweating forehead; while Leo
  Ramirez, seeing the bright fish-scales glued
  With blood and slime to the boat-thwarts glitter like a night of
  stars, began to sing a stale song: "We'll always,
  Be young and gay.
  
  We'll always, feel that way.
  
  " Lois said "Shut
  up," and led them around the boat,
  Her friend lay in the moonlight nestled against it.
  
  Lois knelt
  down and gently drew her by the shoulder;
  She groaned in her sleep, resisting.
  
  Lois laughed, "The boys want
  to see it, Sadie," and tugged, and turned her
  Onto her back, the stained pale face up to the moonlight; the
  teeth in the opened mouth glittered,
  And sour breath crossed them, while Lois turned up the blouse,
  loosened the band and jerked up the linen shift
  To show a three-masted sailing-ship tattooed with black and red
  inks on the soft white belly
  Below the breasts.
  
  "My God," Ramirez said, "there it is.
  
  "
  Lois answered, "A fellow dared her," and looked for Lance,
  Who trembled and said, "Cover her up, damn you.
  
  "
  Lois blinking drew down the blouse.
  
  Ramirez giggled,
  "My God, a U.
  
  S.
  
  flag at the peak," and reached
  Over Lois's shoulder to raise the cloth;
  Lance struck and felled him, and stepping across him fallen
  Leaned and strode toward the cliff and the red coals
  That had been the fire.
  
  Drunken Charlie lay on the sand,
  The iron bolt erect by his feet; Lance caught it up
  And smashed the jug, and saw the remnant of whiskey
  Glitter among the shards to sink into sand.
  
  He ground his teeth; he saw in his mind in the stream of images
  A second jug, and began to search for it.
  
  The tide had fallen, the
  steep ribbon of beach was but little wider,
  But the sea was become so flattened that no waves flashed.
  
  Enormous
  peace of the sea, white quiet of the cliff,
  And at their angle and focus a few faint specks of humanity
  happy in liquor or released in sleep,
  But Lance alone.
  
  Then noises like the cries of a woman screaming,
  bird after bird of sharp-colored sound
  Flew on the face of the cliff, tattered wild wings against jagged
  rocks.
  
  On the cliffhead the patient horses
  Turned their ears, grooving small wrinkles about the roots of the
  cartilage, but did not lift up their heads;
  And the sea was not moved, nor the moonlight quivered.
  
  Will
  Howard was lying beside Nell Ramirez; they'd fallen asleep
  Before he had his desire; they sighed and stirred in the sand.
  
  He
  murmured "Oh, somebody's got hysterics,"
  And wriggled his fingers, which had grown painfully numb
  between her plump knees.
  
  But Lois, Leo Ramirez
  And Drunken Charlie heard the sounds nearer; they went in a
  wind of fear to find out their fountain,
  And Sadie awoke in the sand and followed heavily,
  Falling but once, catching her clothes that slipped,
  Whining at the hollow pain in her skull.
  
  Beyond a rock
  Stood Lance, high white in the moon-glaze, distorted, taller than human;
  Lois said, "Dearie?
  
  " He babbled, "Oh Jesus Christ Oh Jesus
  Christ Oh Jesus Christ,"
  Behind him in a great shadow of her hair darkened
  By the rock-shadow Fayne turned her white wedge of face
  With three holes in it.
  
  She was kneeling, bent S-shape,
  And seemed to stare up from the very ground.
  
  She said, "I think
  It is finished.
  
  Water please.
  
  Water please.
  
  He fell down from the cliff.
  
  " Then Michael's feet were seen,
  And thence the prone extended ridge of his body
  Ending indefinitely under Fayne's face.
  
  Lois cried, "He's hurt.
  
  " But they dared not approach
  For Lance standing between, high and twisted
  Like a dead tree.
  
  Lance said, "I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Fayne cried,
  "He fell down from the cliff.
  
  " They all stood silent,
  Lois's mouth opened and closed on silence
  Three times, then asked, "Is he hurt?
  
  " Lance said, "Oh Christ.
  
  I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Fayne cried so that his words were hidden,
  And stood up and said, "He has died.
  
  Michael.
  
  He was climbing the cliff and fell, his foot caught on that bush;
  He struck his head on that rock, on that edge of rock.
  
  It is all broken in.
  
  Oh, we loved him.
  
  "
  Ramirez said, "What for did he climb up there?
  
  "
  "Have we drunk waterY* Fayne said.
  
  But Lance began
  To shake, like a tall dead mast of redwood that men are felling,
  It is half cut through, each dip of the axe the sonorous timber
  quivers from the root up to the cloud,
  He said "I caught them .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "He caught him," Fayne cried,
  "when he fell but he could not save him.
  
  " "I killed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  "You are wild with sorrow
  He fell head down whether you'd tried to catch him or not.
  
  You are not to blame.
  
  " He said, "It is horrible
  To hear the lies from her mouth like bees from a hot hive: I am
  the one," but Fayne running to him
  Made an animal moan in her throat in time to hide what he said.
  
  She came to Lance, and her face
  Like a held spear, and said, "Drunkard.
  
  Too drunk to be understood.
  
  Keep still until you can talk and be
  understood.
  
  " He drew backward from her,
  Shuddering like a horse from a snake, but when his back was
  against the rock he stammered, "I
  Will find my time.
  
  " "Yes," she answered, "be quiet now.
  
  Tomorrow
  when you are better they'll understand you.
  
  "
  "Is he dead?
  
  " "Keep still.
  
  Will you shame his end
  With drunkard babbling?
  
  For he was the dearest," she said, "in
  the world to all of us.
  
  Lovelier than morning light
  On the mountain before the morning.
  
  There is not one of us
  would not have died for him: I would, I would, I would,"
  She cried writhing, "but not lose Lance too.
  
  How can I plan to
  save him, I've got what I can't bear?
  
  You are all our friends.
  
  "
  She set her hands in the masses of red-dark hair, dark in the
  moonlight, and tearing it, with her white face
  To the white moon: "That eye's blind.
  
  Like Juan Arriba's old
  mare he used to beat on the face,
  Her eyes froze white like that.
  
  He was larking on the cliff and
  fell.
  
  " She seemed to be treading a tragic dance,
  She was scuffling sand to cover the bolt of shipwreck that lay in
  the shadow of the rock; she wrung her hands
  And knelt moaning by Michael's head; she rose with blood on her
  hand and fibers of hair, and ran
  To the rock under the cliff.
  
  "This rock killed him.
  
  He fell on this
  edge," she drew her hand on the edge
  And the rock was stained.
  
  Then Sadie was heard gasping from
  her poor stained face.
  
  One or two looked at her.
  
  "O-uh,"
  She whispered hoarsely, "we was having fun!"
  Lance moved at
  length, like a dead man walking, toward his dead brother,
  And stooped as one stoops to gather a sleeping child.
  
  Fayne ran
  and said, "No, the man.
  
  No, the man.
  
  He has to come.
  
  " Lance turned toward her his face like a paralyzed man's
  Slack with peace, and said softly, "The man.
  
  "
  "He'd think wrong has been done.
  
  I can't think .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  coroner.
  
  Don't take him up.
  
  " "Home?
  
  " he said,
  Seeming gently surprised; he gathered the body
  Into his arms and walked along the foot of the cliff.
  
  Fayne stayed behind a moment, the others following.
  
  She cast quick looks over the rocks and sand;
  One end of the rusty bolt was visible still;
  She leaned toward it and fell on her face.
  
  She labored up
  And went ten steps to the ebb and flung the iron
  To the water edge.
  
  Lance walked along the foot of the cliff.
  
  He turned, not where the path went up, and walked
  Into the face of the cliff, and stood there walking
  Like an ox in a tread-mill, until Ramirez
  Showed him the path.
  
  Fayne went up behind him.
  
  Half way up
  He awoke a moment out of his automatism
  To feel failure and pain, his breathing like knives, and the failure
  Of his eyes; it was impossible to see the path;
  He checked a step and fell forward.
  
  Fayne came up to him
  And stood; there was nothing that she could do.
  
  They lay
  Very peacefully together, Lance's face
  On his brother's breast.
  
  She looked across them;
  Terribly far down the moonlight cliff crouched the dark sea.
  
  Ramirez came up and stood.
  
  Fayne said they had not the strength
  to carry up either of the fallen, and so
  They had to wait.
  
  They heard a faint breeze through the dry
  bushes; and the crying of sea-lions far down below,
  Where eight or ten were lying in a circle by the softly heaving
  kelp-bed, as their custom is, and gazed
  With great mild eyes at the sky and the night of water.
  
  Then
  they sing in their manner, lifting up sleek
  Dark-shining muzzles to the white moon, making a watery noise
  of roaring and a lonely crying
  For joy of life and the night.
  
  At length Lance
  Began to paw with his feet like a dreaming hound,
  And some stones fell.
  
  He knelt and stood up
  And took his burden and went up.
  
  When they entered the sleeping
  farmstead,
  Fayne led the horse; Lance held his brother and rode behind him,
  It would be hard to tell which one was slain
  If the moon shone on their faces.
  
  The horse stopped and sighed
  By the garden-gate; Lance did not move to dismount,
  But sat and held up his brother.
  
  Fayne came beside,
  Reaching to help; Lance whispered "Ah, ah, thank God.
  
  "
  "What?
  
  " "He may be saved, Fayne.
  
  He is hot under the arms and I heard him breathe.
  
  "
  "You heard the horse breathe," she said.
  
  They lifted down
  The unmanageable weight.
  
  Oh, ignorant penitents,
  For surely the cause is too small for so much anguish.
  
  To be drunk is a folly, to kill may call judgment down,
  But these are not enormous evils,
  And as for your brother, he has not been hurt.
  
  For all the delights he has lost, pain has been saved him;
  And the balance is strangely perfect,
  And why are you pale with misery?
  
  Because you have saved him from foolish labors and all the vain
  days?
  
  From desires denied, and desires staled with attaining,
  And from fear of want, and from all diseases, and from fear of
  death?
  
  Or because you have kept him from becoming old,
  When the teeth drop and the eyes dim and the ears grow dull,
  And the man is ashamed?
  
  Surely it is nothing worse to be slain in the overflowing
  Than to fall in the emptiness;
  And though this moon blisters the night,
  Darkness has not died, good darkness will come again;
  Sometimes a fog will come in from sea,
  Sometimes a cloud will crop all the stars.
  
  IV
  The moonlight from the west window was a square cloth
  Laid on the floor, with one corner on the bed,
  Lying over Michael's hand; they had taken him
  To his own room.
  
  Fayne whispered: "Now we must tell them.
  
  Your mother may die-her sick heart.
  
  Don't let her die too bitterly.
  
  For this one night, dear,
  Say nothing worse than 'Michael's gone.
  
  ' Spare her something
  Until she has cried.
  
  Four hours' mercy.
  
  By morning
  That heart of hers will be seasoned.
  
  " Fayne strained in the dark
  To see his face.
  
  He answered in a short while,
  "How many mornings I've come in here
  And routed him out of bed.
  
  He always was a late sleeper.
  
  Sound asleep, Mother.
  
  " Fayne caught his arm.
  
  "Can't you hear me?
  
  "
  "You," he said, "keep your hands off! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Until morning
  I'll say he fell.
  
  "
  It was not morning, but the moon was down.
  
  The old mother sat by the bed with her hand on Michael's, regularly
  her great fat-swollen body
  Jerked with a sob, and tears were spurted from her closed eyes.
  
  Old Fraser sat with his fists evenly
  Together on his knees, his bony face held erect, the brown eyes in
  their hollows red with lamplight.
  
  Fayne heard the noise of a motor starting and left the room.
  
  He was backing out the big truck,
  The shed was full of the headlight glare, the ruby tail-light
  glowed by the axle.
  
  Before she could come
  It had crept out; its light swung up the driveway by the stooping
  sycamore
  And picked from darkness the heavy timbers of the high corrals
  and the white beehives remote on the hill;
  Fayne ran down the river of light to the gate and closed it, and
  stood in the gate for fear he might smash through;
  But Lance came wearily to open; stooping, tall,
  Black on the light.
  
  She said, "Oh, where?
  
  " "You know.
  
  Tell dad to come to Salinas and get the truck;
  There wasn't enough gas in the little one.
  
  "
  She answered, "Can the sheriff make us happy again?
  
  Or the judge make Michael alive again?
  
  " "Open the gate.
  
  "
  "Yes, dear.
  
  Listen to me.
  
  When Arriba and his boys
  Stole cows of ours, did you run to the courthouse?
  
  We take care of ourselves down here.
  
  What we have done
  Has to be borne.
  
  It's in ourselves and there's no escaping,
  The state of California can't help you bear it.
  
  That's only a herd of people, the state.
  
  Oh, give your heart to the hawks for a snack o' meat
  But not to men.
  
  " When she touched him with her hands,
  Pleading, he sighed and said, "If I'd been nearer
  My decent mind, it would have been you, not Michael.
  
  Did y' love him?
  
  Or was it only because you're female
  And were drunk, female and drunk?
  
  " "Oh.
  
  Hush.
  
  I was begging him
  Not to leave us, as I'm begging you.
  
  He promised me, dear.
  
  He said he'd not go away.
  
  I kissed him for that; he was our brother;
  And you came behind.
  
  " Lance's blackness of his leaning bulk
  Vibrated in the light-beam.
  
  "It'd be a pity for me then.
  
  I can't see clear, in the dirty streaming memories .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Don't be afraid; your part will be secret.
  
  I'll say I killed him for nothing, a flea-bite quarrel,
  Being beastly drunk.
  
  " "He was killed," she answered, "for nothing.
  
  "
  "It's a great pity for me then.
  
  Open the gate.
  
  " She clung to the timber bolt
  To hold it home in the slot, and felt his mind
  Tearing itself.
  
  "Lance.
  
  Lance?
  
  Sweetheart:
  Believe .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  whatever you need to save you.
  
  I won't give you up.
  
  You can't remember what happened;
  I tell you he fell from the cliff.
  
  But if your dreadful
  Dream were true, I know you are strong enough
  To give your heart to the hawks without a cry
  And bear it in lonely silence to the end of life.
  
  What else do you want?
  
  Ah.
  
  Confession's a coward
  Running to officers, begging help.
  
  Not you.
  
  "
  She heard
  The scrape of slow boots on gravel outside the light-stream,
  Across the pulses of the idling motor, and suddenly cried,
  "He fell from the cliff.
  
  " An old man said in the dark,
  "They ain't got consideration.
  
  Where was you going
  This time o' night, after what's happened?
  
  Your dad wants you.
  
  Your ma's took bad.
  
  " Lance moaned and stood still.
  
  Fayne said, "He was going to Lobos to telephone
  The doct .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the coroner.
  
  Dearest, you ought to go in.
  
  She suffered great pain before, she was near death.
  
  Old Davie will drive up the coast for you
  When daylight comes.
  
  " "Oh," he said stilly, and turned
  His face to the fountains of light; it gleamed without meaning
  In the stream of radiance like a stake in a stream,
  Except that from exhaustion the pupils of the eyes
  Failed to contract, so that their secret interiors
  Of their chambers returned the light all sanguine.
  
  At length he kneaded them with his fists and said,
  "I can't see well.
  
  You'll have to help me find the way in.
  
  It's not a trick of yours, uh?
  
  "
  V
  His mother lay on the floor,
  For Michael's body lay on the bed.
  
  The sun of pain at her heart
  had rays like skewers of anguish
  Along the left arm and up by the jugular arteries.
  
  She dared
  not move; her face stood wet-white and still,
  With live blue eyes; but the clay-pale lips opened and closed.
  
  Old Eraser had swathed her in hasty blankets.
  
  Fayne entered; Lance behind her stood swaying and stooping
  in the door and saw his father
  Crouched beside the great cocoon of the blankets; and Michael in
  the bed above, and trinkets of Michael's
  That hung on the wall, gleam in the lamplight.
  
  The violence of
  pain was brief; she whispered "better," and breathed
  With greedy shallow passion; her eyes found Lance.
  
  Daylight
  grayed slowly into the room;
  The lamp ran dry unnoticed.
  
  Lance and his father
  Labored and carried the heavy old woman to bed.
  
  Fayne brought them food, but Lance refused it.
  
  In the afternoon
  He walked outdoors for a time, but nothing farther
  Than the cattle-pens.
  
  Fayne must have been watching for him,
  Because she went and walked by his side, and said,
  When they were turned from the house, "Mary Abbey was here.
  
  It seems she expected to marry Michael, though he never told us.
  
  She cried a lot.
  
  " Lance made no sign of hearing her.
  
  Fayne said, looking up sidelong at his cheek and jaw,
  Where the flesh hung thin on the bone: "Her griefs not
  Like ours, forever; but sharp at present.
  
  If she ever
  Imagined that you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  how could we bear her looks?
  
  You are
  too strong, dear,
  To lay on weaker persons a burden
  That you alone ought to bear.
  
  " He strode faster
  And stopped, muttering, "He lies up there, like that.
  
  And my mother, like that; and I have done it;
  And you talk about Mary Abbey.
  
  " Fayne said, "I have no time
  To choose names, for a man is coming to-day
  To question us.
  
  He's sent for.
  
  I have to tell you that you must
  choose whether to relieve
  Your own weakness , .
  
  .
  
  conscience I mean .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  by easy confession,
  Or bear the whole weight unhelped.
  
  The first way's easy; you'll
  be acquitted; you'll be left humbled and soiled,
  But free; for confession is not enough; and you were too lost to
  remember anything clearly; and I
  Am the one witness.
  
  I saw him climb on the cliff and fall.
  
  So your
  conscience will be well comforted,
  And fairly cheap.
  
  Only your mother perhaps will die of it; your
  father and I will swallow our portion;
  And the crowd at Salinas
  Will have had a good time watching your face in court.
  
  It would
  be harder, if you’ve a snake in your heart,
  To keep it shut there.
  
  "
  He was silent, and drew sharp breath and
  said, "A red-haired one.
  
  Ah.
  
  A white one with a red brush.
  
  Did you do it with him
  Or not?
  
  " "Leave that," she said stilly; "this choice is now?
  
  He groaned and answered, "My mind's not quick like yours.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I'll not lie to them.
  
  " "Let me show your mind to you;
  Be patient a moment still; if I seem cruel,
  That's to save, all that's left.
  
  Look at yourself:
  A man who believes his own sweet brother's blood
  Lies on his hands: yet
  Too scrupulous to tell a lie, for his mother's life.
  
  Our minds are wonderful.
  
  " He meditated, and answered
  Heavily, "The sunlight seems dull but red.
  
  What makes it red?
  
  " "Your eyes are sick of not sleeping;
  Or there's a forest-fire in the south.
  
  " "Our minds?
  
  Little bottles
  That hold all hell.
  
  I seem too tired to feel it, though.
  
  I'll think, I'll think.
  
  "
  "You have no time for thinking.
  
  He will come probably
  Within this hour.
  
  " "Who?
  
  Let him come.
  
  I'll tell him
  God made them male and female but men have made
  So-and-so .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I fall asleep while I talk .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  whiskey eh?
  
  Lighted the sticky fire.
  
  It's not possible
  I'd ever done it except that I stumbled on you
  In the heart of guilt.
  
  I know that.
  
  " "Believe it then,"
  She answered shrilly, and stood twitching her lips
  In the white freckled face, in the reddish light of her hair,
  "If that will help.
  
  " "Oh," he said.
  
  ".
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I wish you had picked from another tree.
  
  "
  She answered: "You are to say that you found him dying.
  
  You heard me cry, and he was down by the rock.
  
  Isn't that the truth exactly, because you remember
  No previous thing?
  
  You heard me cry out; you came;
  Michael was dying or had died.
  
  That's all.
  
  You carried him home.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  , I wish he'd come.
  
  "
  But the man did not come
  Until afternoon the next day.
  
  Dark weather, for a stagnant ocean
  of cloud was hung on the sky,
  And what light shone came colored like the taste of metal through
  smoke of burning forests far to the south,
  That veiled the coast, so that it seemed brown twilight
  In the house, in Michael's room.
  
  A lamp was lighted,
  The death-wound viewed.
  
  "Who saw him fall?
  
  " "I alone.
  
  My husband and others came when I cried.
  
  " "Where is your husband?
  
  "
  "With his mother," she answered faintly.
  
  "She had an attack,
  Her heart, angina, and has to lie still.
  
  Shall I
  Call him, sir?
  
  " her voice hardening, her eyes
  Growing hard and narrow.
  
  "Pretty soon.
  
  Was this young man
  In trouble about anything?
  
  " "No.
  
  " "A girl?
  
  " "He was engaged
  To Miss Abbey.
  
  " "They had a quarrel, ah?
  
  " "No.
  
  "
  "Did he seem cheerful?
  
  " "Very.
  
  " "They always do.
  
  Yesterday I had to drive by Elkhorn Slough
  Because a very cheerful old man opened his throat
  With his nephew’s pen-knife.
  
  I was two hours
  Finding that place; the farmers around there they couldn't tell you
  Whether Jesus Christ died on the cross
  Or at the battle of Bull Run.
  
  "
  Old Eraser had stood
  Nerveless and dreaming over the livid face
  Since they uncovered it; abruptly he turned his head
  Above his bowed shoulder, saying "It's enough.
  
  Dog, blaspheme not.
  
  Go to your own place.
  
  My son found death in recklessness, I fear in folly;
  Write that and leave us alone; go hence and leave us
  To mourn and hope.
  
  " "Well, Mr.
  
  Fraser.
  
  You understand .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  "I am very patient," the old man said, thrusting
  His hollowed face toward the other, the closely set
  Inflamed brown eyes pushing like the burnt end of a stick
  That has been used to stir fire; the man stepped backward.
  
  "Did he say patient! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Well, is your husband here?
  
  "
  Fayne's mouth jerked and froze hard, her hands quieted.
  
  "I will call him.
  
  Come to the room downstairs.
  
  "
  She said at the foot of the stair, "This way, sir.
  
  It's dark.
  
  Will you have to go .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  to see the cliff, to see
  The cliff?
  
  " "Hm, what's that?
  
  " "Where he fell.
  
  "
  "Can we drive there?
  
  " "No, ride and walk.
  
  " "Look here,"
  He said, "I've come sixty-five miles already.
  
  You're sure it was accidental?
  
  " "Yes.
  
  " "Well.
  
  I always try to save the family feelings
  When the case is not clear.
  
  " He tried his pen,
  Shook it, and wrote.
  
  Fayne watched, quiet and cold, thinking that Lance
  Would not have to be questioned; he was saved now;
  And saw the man to his car.
  
  When he had gone
  She thought that now she could laugh or cry if she wanted to,
  Now Lance was saved, but her nerves and her mind stood quiet.
  
  She looked at the dusty gate and the dark house-gable
  In the stagnant air against the black cloud, and perceived that all
  events are exact and were shaped beforehand,
  And spaced in a steel frame; when they come up we know them;
  there is nothing for excitement.
  
  She went in,
  And found Lance in the dark at the head of the stair, bent forward
  like a great bird.
  
  "Has he gone, Fayne?
  
  "
  "Did you know he was here?
  
  " "I will live on," he answered,
  "seems to be best.
  
  I loved him well; he died instantly,
  No anger nor pain.
  
  Davis has dug a place by the children's
  graves.
  
  "
  On account of the dull weather
  And closing twilight the group on the hilltop was hardly visible
  in their vast scene.
  
  It was quite evident
  That not only Pico Blanco against the north, and the gray Ventanas,
  but even every dry fold
  And gully of the humbler hills was almost by an infinite measure
  of more importance
  Than the few faint figures on the bare height,
  The truck, and three saddled horses,
  And some persons.
  
  The old man swayed and shook, standing praying
  At the head of a dug slot
  Beside the pile of pale earth.
  
  The heavy great brown-furred sky that covered all things made
  a red point in the west, lost it and darkened,
  And the Point Sur lighthouse made a thin stabbing from the
  northwest.
  
  Swaying on his heels and toes the old man prayed:
  "Oh Lord our God, when thy churches fell off from thee
  To go awhoring after organ music,
  Singing-women and lecturers, then my people
  Came out from among them; and when thy last church,
  Thy little band, thy chosen, was turned at length
  To lust for wealth and amusement and worldly vanities,
  I cried against them and I came forth from among them.
  
  I promised thee in that day that I and my house
  Would remain faithful, thou must never despair;
  I said, though all men forget thee thou hast a fort
  Here in these hills, one candle burning in the infidel world,
  And my house is thy people.
  
  My children died,
  And I laid them in this place and begot more children
  To be thy servants, and I taught them thy ways, but they fell
  away from thee.
  
  They found their pleasure among the ungodly, and I believe
  They made themselves drunk with wine, and my dear son is fallen.
  
  He died on the shore.
  
  One half of the curse of Eli has fallen upon me.
  
  "
  He covered his face with his knotted hands and stood gasping,
  And said, "I loved him.
  
  Here he is, Lord.
  
  Surely thou hast forgiven his sins as I have forgiven them,
  And wilt lift him to thy glory on the last day.
  
  "
  The old man stood silent, lifting his face, and fixed his deep
  close-set eyes, like the eyes of an old ape,
  Small, dark and melancholy under the bar of the brow, between
  the wide cheek-bones, fixed them far off
  Across the darkening ridges and ocean upon that single red spot
  that waned in the western sky,
  And said "The world darkens and the end is coming.
  
  I cannot beget more children; I am old and empty,
  And my wife is old.
  
  All men have turned their faces away from thee;
  I alone am thy church.
  
  Lord God, I beseech thee not to despair,
  But remember thine ancient power, and smite the ungodly on
  their mouths
  And the faithless churches with utter destruction.
  
  For Jesus'
  sake, amen.
  
  " While he prayed, Fayne watched Lance
  With pity and fear; and Mary Abbey, who was there with her father,
  Kept stealing glances at Lance through her wet eyelashes.
  
  She whispered to Fayne: "Oh, Lance looks dreadfully.
  
  I never knew he loved him so dreadfully.
  
  "
  Fayne answered, "Yes, he did"; and looked up at Lance
  With pity and fear.
  
  "He looks as if he'd fall sick,"
  Mary said.
  
  Fayne answered, "No, he is strong.
  
  He hasn't eaten since Michael died; maybe
  He hasn't slept.
  
  " Mary said, wiping her eyes,
  "His face is so sad and fine, like carved marble.
  
  They say he carried him all the way home, up that cliff.
  
  "
  The old man ended his prayer, the redwood box
  Was lowered with ropes; Lance had the weight at one end,
  Old Fraser and Davis at the other.
  
  The ropes cut grooves
  In the earth edges.
  
  While they were shovelling earth,
  Mary Abbey, with a sudden abandoned gesture
  Of the hand that had the handkerchief in it, ran up to Lance
  On the scraped ground.
  
  "Don't grieve so.
  
  " She reached and touched
  His hand on the spade-handle.
  
  "It makes me afraid for you.
  
  We all loved him; life has to go on.
  
  " He jerked his hand,
  And looked down at her face with startled eyes
  So pale gray-blue that all the light that remained in the world
  Under the low black sky seemed to live in them,
  Stammering, "No.
  
  No.
  
  He fell from the cliff.
  
  " She said, "I know, Lance.
  
  We have to bear it.
  
  I loved him too.
  
  " He gathered his dreaming nerves
  Into the bundle again and said, "Oh.
  
  All right.
  
  Please keep out of
  the way for the time.
  
  We have this to do.
  
  " "Good-bye," she answered patiently.
  
  "Father's
  calling me.
  
  "
  The pit was filled full and mounded;
  Fayne came and said, "What was she saying to you?
  
  " "Nothing.
  
  Who?
  
  " "Mary Abbey.
  
  " "I didn't see her.
  
  "
  "What, Lance?
  
  She came and spoke to you.
  
  " "I'd rather be there
  with Michael," he answered.
  
  "Dear, you must rouse yourself.
  
  Life has to go on.
  
  " "Somebody was saying so, I think.
  
  There's not a hawk in the sky.
  
  " She answered from a hoarse
  throat, "After dark?
  
  What are you dreaming?
  
  See, Davie's turned on the headlights.
  
  " "I hate them," he said,
  "killers, dirty chicken-thieves.
  
  "
  The farm-truck headlights
  Shone on the mounded earth, and cast its enormously lengthened
  shadow and the shadows of a few moving
  Persons across the world, with the beam of light, over mound
  beyond mound of bare autumn hills, and black
  Ocean under the black-roofed evening.
  
  VI
  That night he returned
  To lie with Fayne in their bed, but like two strangers
  Lying in one bed in a crowded inn, who avoid
  Touching each other; but the fifth night
  She laid her hand on the smooth strength of his breast,
  He pretended to be asleep, she moved against him,
  Plucking his throat with her lips.
  
  He answered, "After all?
  
  You're right.
  
  If we're to live in this life
  We'll keep its customs.
  
  " He approached her confidently,
  And had no power.
  
  The little irrational anger
  At finding himself ridiculous brought to his mind
  That worse rage, never before clearly remembered,
  But now to the last moment; or imagined.
  
  He drew
  His limbs from Fayne's without thinking of her, and lay still,
  with shut fists,
  Sweating, staring up spirals of awful darkness, that spun away up
  and wound over his eyes
  Around a hollow gray core with flecks in it.
  
  "I am damned unjustly.
  
  I did it in a moment.
  
  "
  But Fayne knew nothing
  Of the shut agony beside her; only she was troubled at heart, and
  wondering
  Whether he had ceased to love her said tenderly, "Sleep,
  Darling.
  
  I didn't mean.
  
  I didn't want.
  
  Only I love you.
  
  " He felt her instinctive hand
  Move downward fondling along the flat of his belly.
  
  He set it aside and spoke, so low that her ears
  Lost every word between the hair and the pillow.
  
  "What, dearest?
  
  " "I know it," he said, "they're dogs: that was exactly
  Fit to tell dogs.
  
  I can be damned
  At home as well.
  
  " "Hush, dear.
  
  " "I don't make a good murderer,"
  He said, "I sweat.
  
  " She was silent and heard him breathing,
  And mourned, "Oh, cover your mind with quietness to-night.
  
  In the morning you'll face it down again.
  
  This will get well with time.
  
  It was really only a dreadful accident.
  
  " "Very damnable," he said,
  "Very true.
  
  " Fayne said, "We'll live, sweetheart, to feel it
  Only a dreadful accident, and the sad death
  Of one we loved.
  
  " "That's your smooth skin.
  
  The fires fester on mine.
  
  Will you do something
  For me?
  
  " "Dearest, with all my heart.
  
  " "An easy kindness:
  Shut up your mouth.
  
  "
  He got up after a time;
  When he went out she followed, trembling.
  
  He turned on her
  Outside the door.
  
  "I'm not going to Salinas,"
  He whispered, "nor bump myself off either.
  
  I'll not starve your hawks of their snatch o' meat.
  
  Now let me alone for Christ's sake.
  
  " She stood and saw him
  Against the starlit window at the end steal down
  The hallway, go past the stairhead, and enter the empty
  Room of his brother.
  
  He slept there from that night on,
  And seemed to regain calm strength.
  
  VII
  In the course of a month
  Rain seemed at hand, the south wind whetting his knife on the
  long mountain and wild clouds flying;
  Lance and his father set out to burn the hill to make pasture.
  
  They
  carried fire in forkfuls of straw
  Along the base of the south wall of their valley; the horses they
  rode snorted against it, and smoke
  Boiled, but the seaward end of the hill would only be burnt in
  patches.
  
  Inland, at the parched end,
  A reach of high grass and sage might have led out the fire to the
  forest, and Lance rode up
  To watch a flame down the wind to black out the danger.
  
  He carried two barley-sacks and went to the Abbeys' trough
  At the hill spring to dip them, to beat down the fire's
  Creepings up wind.
  
  From that spur of the mountain
  He saw the planted pine trees at Abbey's place,
  And riding back with the dipped sacks, the vale
  Of his own place, the smoke-mist, and Sycamore Creek
  Wound like a long serpent down the small fields.
  
  He set his fires and watched them rage with the wind,
  Easily stifling their returns, riding herd
  On the black line; then from the base of the hill
  Red surf, and the dark spray rolled back by the wind,
  Of the other fire came up roaring.
  
  The lines met
  On the fall of the hill like waves at a river's mouth
  That spout up and kill each other, and hang white spray
  On cold clear wind.
  
  A rabbit with blazing fur broke through the back-fire,
  Bounding and falling, it passed by Lance and ran
  Straight into the stem of a wild lilac bush,
  He saw it was blind from the fire, and watching it struggle away
  Up its dark pain, saw Mary Abbey coming down the black hill
  against the white sky,
  Treading on embers.
  
  Lance turned and hardened in the saddle,
  and saw the vale below him a long trough of smoke
  Spilled northward, then Mary came near and said, "I wanted to
  talk to you.
  
  I saw you ride by the water-trough.
  
  "
  He shuddered and said, "What?
  
  I'll watch the fire.
  
  " "Fayne
  doesn't like me so well I think
  Since Michael .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  indeed I'm ashamed to be always around your house.
  
  "
  "I noticed you there," he said, carefully regarding
  The dark braids of her hair, and the pale brown face
  Seen from above.
  
  "I don't know," she said.
  
  "My father says to go away for a time,
  His sister lives on a place in Idaho.
  
  But I wouldn't want to forget.
  
  But I told Fayne .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  So I don't know.
  
  We could see that you grieved for him
  More deeply than anyone else, and all these great hills are empty.
  
  "
  He said, "Is that all?
  
  " "Ah .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ?
  
  Yes," she answered,
  And turned away and looked back.
  
  Lance found that the bridle-leather
  Had broken suddenly between his hands, and said "You won't get
  anything from Fayne; she's hard as iron.
  
  Why do you follow us around?
  
  What do you think you'll find
  out?
  
  " She said, "Your grief is greater perhaps,
  For you knew him longer.
  
  But you have Fayne and I have nobody:
  speak kindly to me.
  
  As I remember,
  At first it came from seeing you and Fayne so happy in each other,
  I wanted to be like that.
  
  I can't talk well, like Fayne,
  But I read a great deal.
  
  " He stared at her face and began to knot
  the bridle, his hands relaxing,
  And said, "I must ride around by the oak-scrub and see that the
  fire has checked.
  
  I've got to be watchful always.
  
  Will you stay here?
  
  " He went and returned and said, "Come
  down to our place whenever you are lonely, Mary.
  
  My mother's quite well again.
  
  His death was .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  do people talk
  much about it?
  
  " She looked in wonder at his face,
  And he with numbed lips: "What lies do they .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  can't you
  speak out?
  
  " "I never
  Talked about it with anyone, since Nina Dolman
  Told us that day.
  
  Truly there's nothing to be said by anyone
  Except, he was bright with life and suddenly nothing, nothing,
  nothing, darkness.
  
  "
  Lance breathed and said sharply, "I wouldn't bet on it
  If I were you.
  
  Mary, you are tender and merciful:
  Don't come to the house; Fayne is like iron.
  
  You'd better
  Run home and forget about us.
  
  Unless you should hear something
  I ought to know.
  
  " "What do you mean?
  
  " "Good-bye.
  
  "
  She saw his bridle-hand lift, she said "I've no pride,
  I pray you not to leave me yet, Lance.
  
  I loved him greatly, and now that bond hangs cut,
  Bleeding on the empty world, it reaches after
  You that were near him, Fayne and you.
  
  I was always
  Without companions, and now I'd give anything
  To be in your friendship a little.
  
  " "Anything?
  
  " he said.
  
  "You faithful women.
  
  Fayne was five days.
  
  Mmhm, I have seen a vision.
  
  My eyes are opened I believe.
  
  "
  He rode across the burnt hill,
  Watching the wind swirl up the ashes and flatten
  The spits of smoke.
  
  Past the singed oak-scrub he began to wonder,
  If there was honey in the little tree, had .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the dead
  Tasted it before he died?
  
  "You'd better be off to Idaho.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I shy from his name like a scared horse.
  
  By God, I'd better get used to it; I've got to live with it.
  
  "
  He looked sharply all about the burnt solitude
  To be sure of no hearers, and recited aloud:
  "I killed Michael.
  
  My name is Lance Fraser.
  
  I murdered my brother Michael.
  
  I was plastered,
  But I caught 'em at it.
  
  I killed my brother Michael.
  
  I'm not afraid to sleep in his room or even
  Take over his girl if I choose.
  
  I am a dog,
  But so are all.
  
  "
  The tall man riding the little bay horse
  Along the burnt ridge, talking loudly to nothing but the ash-drifting
  wind; a shadow passed his right shoulder;
  He turned on it with slitted eyes, and saw through the strained
  lashes against the gray wind a ghastly old woman
  Pursuing him, bent double with age and fury, her brown cloak
  wild on the wind, but when she turned up the wind
  It was only a redtail hawk that hunted
  On the burnt borders, making her profit in the trouble of field-mice.
  
  Lance groaned in his throat "Go up you devil.
  
  Ask your high places whether they can save you next time.
  
  "
  VIII
  Leo Ramirez rode down on business
  About redwood for fence-posts; he asked in vain
  For Lance, and had to deal with old Eraser.
  
  When he went out
  He saw red hair around the corner of the house
  And found Fayne in the garden, and asked for Lance.
  
  "I couldn't tell you.
  
  I saw him ride to the south.
  
  He'll be home soon for supper.
  
  " Ramirez stood
  In troubled silence, looking at the earth, and said
  "I wonder ought I to tell him .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Fayne's body quivered
  Ever so slightly, her face grew carefully blank.
  
  'What, Leo?
  
  " "Will Howard, for instance.
  
  Mouths that can't
  Shut up for the love of God.
  
  " "He drives the coast-stage,"
  Fayne answered carefully.
  
  Ramirez looked over the creek
  At the branded flanks of the south hill, and no rain had come
  To streak them with gray relentings.
  
  "He didn't see it,"
  He said; "and those two janes on vacation
  Went back to town the next day.
  
  " He giggled, remembering
  The sailing-ship stippled on the white skin,
  And fixed his mind smooth again.
  
  Fayne said, "How dares he
  Lie about us?
  
  " Ramirez's brown soft eyes
  Regarded her with mournful wonder and slid away.
  
  He said, "You was very quick-thinking.
  
  " "What?
  
  " she said, "You
  were there.
  
  And when I cried to him to be careful you looked
  And saw him larking on the rock, and you saw him fall,
  You could see very plainly in the awful moonlight.
  
  These are things, Leo, that you could swear to.
  
  " He nodded,
  And slid his red tongue along his dry lips and answered,
  "Yes'm.
  
  " "So Howard's a liar," she said.
  
  "But don't tell Lance;
  He'd break him in two.
  
  We'll all do very well,
  All wicked stories will die, long long before
  Our ache of loss.
  
  " "Yes'm.
  
  " She walked beside him
  To his tethered horse, and charmed him with an impulsive handclasp
  After he was in the saddle.
  
  She stood with her face high, the
  great sponge of red hair
  Lying like a helmet-plume on her shoulders, and thought she was
  sure of conquering security but she was tired;
  She was not afraid of the enemy world, but Michael would never
  be here laughing again.
  
  On the hill,
  In the hill he lay; it was stranger than that, and sharper.
  
  And his killer
  Ought to be hated a little in the much love.
  
  The smells in the
  wind were of ocean, the reedy creek-mouth,
  Cows, and wood-smoke, and chile-con-carne on the kitchen stove;
  it was harder to analyze thoughts in the mind.
  
  She looked at the dear house and its gables
  Darkening so low against the hill and wide sky and the evening
  color commencing; it was Lance's nest
  Where he was born, and his great white body grew high and
  beautiful.
  
  Old Davie shuffled up from the calf-pens
  Into the house; then far and high, like a tiny horn on the hill
  against the green-saffron heaven
  Lance grew into sight, the man and the horse and the evening
  peace.
  
  He was well again; he was sometimes cheerful
  Since the early plowing; his muscles needed strong labor.
  
  He was
  like this mountain coast,
  All beautiful, with chances of brutal violence; precipitous, dark-natured,
  beautiful; without humor, without ever
  A glimmer of gayety; blind gray headland and arid mountain,
  and trailing from his shoulders the infinite ocean.
  
  So love, that hunts always outside the human for his choice of metaphors,
  Pictured her man on her mind.
  
  He dropped from sight
  In the hill thickets.
  
  She thought, "That's the direction
  From the Abbeys' or farther south.
  
  Mary Abbey's
  Quit haunting our house.
  
  " The sky grew ever more luminous pale,
  The hills more solid purple.
  
  At the valley sea-mouth pale rose
  layered over amber, and over the rose
  Pale violet, high over the lifted hawk-wings of divided hills, to
  one fine twist of flamingo-feather
  Cloud flying in the wind and arch of the world.
  
  A bat flitted up
  the still glimmer.
  
  Fayne went up the drive and opened the gate
  For Lance coming across the fields.
  
  He looked
  As if he had fought, a victory; Fayne was silent;
  He nodded, and said, "I've got it over with.
  
  You were right.
  
  "
  She saw a thin drift of blood on the bay's foreleg;
  A big brown bird hung from the saddle-thongs,
  The half-spread sail of one wing clasped Lance's knee;
  He had his rifle.
  
  "Another hawk, Lance?
  
  " "Fve been there,'*
  He answered.
  
  "Oh, this?
  
  I pick 'em off when I see 'em.
  
  I've been back to that place.
  
  " "What place, dear?
  
  " "The .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Slaughter-house.
  
  Under the cliff.
  
  Ah: I looked around there.
  
  And rubbed that .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  time into my eyes
  Until it formed.
  
  Now I guess it won't mix
  With every mouthful of air; I can call it to memory
  Or shut it up.
  
  " Fayne looked at his drawn face.
  
  But she thought he seemed a degree restored
  To natural goodness again, for he dismounted
  And walked beside her.
  
  She smelled the prickly sweet fragrance
  Of whiskey, and said: "That nasty old man was there.
  
  Lance: you were careful with him?
  
  " "Care?
  
  " he said, "Hell.
  
  We talked about fish.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I heard once about a fellow in jail
  Kept banging his head on the wall until he died:
  I'd liefer have done that than killed my brother.
  
  I often .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  miss him.
  
  " He stopped to tie up the hawk's feet
  To the top wire of the fence; thence they went on
  Without speaking.
  
  At supper he said suddenly across the table,
  "Listen, dad.
  
  Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?
  
  When Mikey and I
  were little you used to have prayers in the evenings
  And flogged us the times we snickered: why did you quit?
  
  " Old
  Fraser fixed his narrow-set apelike eyes
  On Lance's face; they seemed to become one thrusting darkness,
  but he said nothing.
  
  After a time
  Lance said, "But why did you quit?
  
  " "Because I grew old and
  powerless," the old man answered.
  
  Lance: "What was that
  You used to read about two sparrows for a farthing?
  
  " "The Book
  is there.
  
  " He nodded toward the other room.
  
  "Look it out for yourself.
  
  " When they stood up from table Lance
  said, "I wish you would read it for us,
  About the sparrows.
  
  " "I will not," he said, "read for your mockery.
  
  I am utterly left alone on earth;
  And God will not rise up in my time.
  
  " But Lance: "Doesn't it say
  No sparrow can fall down without God?
  
  " Fayne said, "Oh,
  Lance: come on.
  
  "
  "No, no; I want him to read and pray.
  
  What does that mean, fall to earth without God?
  
  Does it mean that God fells it?
  
  Fayne and I
  Know better than that: ah, Fayne?
  
  We know, ah?
  
  But God connives.
  
  Do read about the two sparrows.
  
  " His roving glance
  Came on his mother's blanched and full-moon face,
  The pouched watery blue eyes, and the mouth always
  Thirsting for breath.
  
  "No, no, I'll keep still, mother.
  
  I didn't want to tease him, I was in earnest
  To have prayers again.
  
  "
  But he remained in the room
  Until his mother had gone up to bed, then instantly
  Said, "Listen, dad.
  
  Be a good sport.
  
  Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?
  
  " Fayne had watched him
  Sitting stone-still, only twitching his hands,
  His face hollow in the lamp-shadow: she went quickly
  And touched his shoulder; she smoothed her hand on his throat,
  Saying, "Please, Lance, no more of that.
  
  Why will you do it?
  
  "
  "Sh," he said, "I have him by a raw spot: keep out.
  
  He spooned the gospel down my throat when I was a cub:
  Why's he so tight wi' that farthing?
  
  Once, dad, you whipped Mikey
  For spelling the name of God backward
  Until the red crucifixion ran down his legs.
  
  Do you remember the brave little brown legs
  All smeared and welted?
  
  " The old man eyed him and said,
  "You lie.
  
  He had a thorn-scratch that opened.
  
  " "Booh," Lance answered,
  "I won't quarrel with you.
  
  I want the truth:
  Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?
  
  " Old Fraser
  Groaned, and the straight edge of the lamp-shade shadow
  That crossed his broad face obliquely over the burning
  Blackness of the eyes, but left the stiff mouth and jaw
  In the yellow light, shook with his passion.
  
  He said, "My Master also
  Was mocked cruelly by those he loved, desiring to save them.
  
  You have a strong body, and if I struck you
  You'd take me by the wrists like a little child.
  
  I am in my house
  and I have no one to help me.
  
  I am old and worn out; my strength is gone and white hair has
  come, but honor has not come.
  
  I say that God
  Is not mocked; but a feeble ailing old man, who loved his boys
  too indulgently and has seen the blithe hands
  Reach out for damnation, and the happy feet .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Is rightly mocked.
  
  Oh Lance, over Michael's death.
  
  " Lance, pale
  and mumbling: "We all have troubles, old man;
  Yours have come late.
  
  Well.
  
  Are not two sparrows .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  Fayne cried, "Lance, Lance, for pity
  Hush, whatever he did to you when you were little.
  
  He earns peace now.
  
  " "Mm," he said, "where's that?
  
  I’ve
  Been trying to get him to call me about those sparrows:
  The old man won't play: we've an ace in the hole too.
  
  Here it is for nothing, old man:
  I rode by the Abbeys' line-fence along the steep
  Over Wreck Beach, and there's a young deer, a spike-buck,
  Hanging dead on the wire, made a bad jump
  From the low side.
  
  The barbs caught him by the loins,
  Across the belly at the spring of the haunches, the top wire.
  
  So there he hangs with his head down, the fore-hooves
  Reaching the ground: they dug two trenches in it
  Under his suspended nose.
  
  That's when he dragged at the barbs
  Caught in his belly, his hind legs hacking the air.
  
  No doubt he lived for a week: nothing has touched him: a young
  spike-buck:
  A week of torture.
  
  What was that for, ah?
  
  D'you think God couldn't see him?
  
  The place is very naked and
  open, and the sea glittering below;
  He hangs like a sign on the earth's forehead, y' could see him from
  China.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But keep the wind side.
  
  For a loving God, a stinking monument.
  
  " "Bosh," the old man answered,
  And stood up, and puckering a miminy mouth: "Your little buck!
  There is not one soul in hell but would take his place on the wire
  Shouting for joy .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and few men past fifty.
  
  " Lance also,
  Made surly by the slow death of whiskey in his blood,
  Stood up: "Your merciful God, that made you whip little boys.
  
  We're dogs,
  But done licking those feet.
  
  " He bulked in the old man's way to
  the door, towering in the shadow, and forced him
  Toward the near corner.
  
  Fayne ran between them.
  
  "Tell me the
  truth," Lance said, "do you believe in your God?
  
  "
  Old Fraser, who had stood glaring like a bayed cat, suddenly
  dwindled; and felt outside the walled cube
  Of lamplight, under gray stars no Scottish nor Palestinian uplands
  but the godless hills of America
  Like vacant-eyed bison lying toward the sea, waiting for rain.
  
  He moved his lips without breath, he struck
  His throat and said feebly: "I am choked and dried up with the
  running sands.
  
  I have prayed a great deal in vain, and seen the whole earth
  Shed faith like leaves;
  And the faces of sin round as the sun and morality
  Sneered to death.
  
  I cannot
  Live unless I believe.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I cannot live";
  And stood all shrunken.
  
  Lance, awed: "My God, who'd ever 'a'
  thought
  He could be plagued into honesty?
  
  " The old man
  Cried fiercely: "I believe.
  
  Ah: tell your people to be careful
  Of the God they have backed into a snarling corner,
  And laugh off like a dirty story.
  
  " "That's it," Lance answered.
  
  "Dogs.
  
  We all are.
  
  " He stood backward, the old man
  Passed slowly, staring, saying, "Make yourself ready if you can.
  
  For I see you are changed.
  
  "
  Fayne shuddered and said,
  "What does he mean?
  
  " "He?
  
  Nothing.
  
  He means two sparrows
  For a farthing.
  
  " She said, "Lance .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Lance?
  
  "
  He moved to leave her; she breathed and said, "Can you hear?
  
  We were doing, what you thought.
  
  It seemed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  usual
  That night: both drunk: he was going away .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  So what you
  did, Lance,
  Was justice.
  
  " "Agh," he said, "nudge me wi' that, still?
  
  I know it perfectly.
  
  What does it matter, what farthing
  Sold them?
  
  " Fayne, sobbing: "Oh, then, we did not.
  
  It is not true.
  
  I lied.
  
  " "It would not be possible to tell you," he said,
  "How little I care.
  
  " She, with both hands at her white throat, but
  lifting her face:
  "Yes.
  
  I can bear that.
  
  We've sailed I think away past the narrows
  of common faithfulness.
  
  Then care for this:
  To be able to live, in spite of pain and that horror and the dear
  blood on your hands, and your father's God,
  To be able to go on in pure silence
  In your own power, not panting for people's judgment, nor the
  pitiful consolation of punishing yourself
  Because an old man filled you with dreams of sin
  When you were little: you are not one of the sparrows, you are
  not a flock-bird: but alone in your nature,
  Separate as a gray hawk.
  
  " "The very thing I was thinking," he
  answered.
  
  "If you'd take your red hair and spindly face
  Out of my lamplight I'd be alone: it's like a burst blood-vessel
  In the eye of thought.
  
  "
  IX
  Old Mrs.
  
  Fraser
  Caught cold and remained in bed, the bronchial pain
  Frightened her heart with memories of worse anguish.
  
  Fayne went back and forth from the stove to the bed
  Heating flannels, to lay them on the white upland
  Between the blond mountains of falling flesh
  That had fed Lance.
  
  Going by the curtainless window
  She looked whether she could see him, across the fields
  Or up the burnt hill.
  
  Not Lance, but a smaller figure
  Was coming down the black hill under white clouds:
  Mary Abbey: her father had horses enough,
  Was she walking down here?
  
  Lance's mother
  Wished for that wintergreen oil again; Fayne rubbed it
  On the white plain and the roots of the great soft udders.
  
  She could feel in her finger-tips the suck and rattle
  Of phlegm in the breathing-tubes, the old woman coughing
  And saying "I see there was four sheets in the wash again
  From you and Lance; well, dearie, don't fret.
  
  He's just his father all over, crazy as hawks.
  
  They get to thinking Antichrist and the Jews and the wicked
  Pope in Rome
  And scunner at every arrangement for human comfort.
  
  Then they come home like hungry sailors from sea.
  
  You're all worn out in the morning; my feet are cold.
  
  "
  She coughed and panted; Fayne rubbed the oil.
  
  The old woman said,
  "My feet are cold.
  
  " Fayne answered sadly "I'll rub them.
  
  "
  "No, if you'd get me an iron; a fine hot flat-iron
  Done up in cloth is a great comfort in bed.
  
  Right often it's been a husband to me when my old man
  Was prophesying around and a fresh cow
  Cried all the night.
  
  "
  Fayne went downstairs for the iron
  And heard a wonderful sound behind the house; she heard Lance
  laughing.
  
  She looked from the door and saw old Davie by the lime-washed
  hen-house, leaning both hands on a long shovel,
  Gaze at the ground; Lance crouched near by, with blood on his
  hands and something between his knees, red feathers,
  That fiery old half-bred game-cock, that sent the dogs
  Yelping for mercy.
  
  A little Cooper's-hawk was tethered in front
  of Lance to a driven peg,
  One wing bloodily trailing; Lance pushed the game-cock toward
  it and the hawk fell, tripped by its wing,
  But crutched itself on the other and came up again,
  Erect and watchful, holding the earth with its yellow feet.
  
  Lance pushed and freed the game-cock, that eagerly
  Staring-hackled in his battle-passion
  Leaped up and struck down; the hawk tripped by its wing
  Fell quivering under the spurs, but a long-fingered
  Lean yellow hand reaching up out of ruin
  Plucked at the red king's breast: who charged again: one hawk-wing
  Waved, and the talons mysteriously accomplished
  Many quick bitter acts, whence the red king
  Reeled out of hope.
  
  He crouched beyond tether's reach,
  Propping himself on both wings, but the sinking head
  Still stretched for fight; then dull-eyed, at strength's end,
  Went staggering to it again.
  
  The yellow hands
  Easily made him what would never any more
  Chirp over bright corn to the hens or subdue a rival.
  
  Lance came, and the little hawk ran quickly and fell
  Onto its broken shoulder at the tether's end.
  
  Lance picked up
  the dying game-cock;
  Red grains of wheat from the torn crop fell down with the
  blood.
  
  Fayne watched from the open door; she saw him
  GIVE YOUR HEART TO THE HAWKS
  Turn at the click of a gate, and Mary Abbey came up from the
  creek-bed path.
  
  At sight of Lance
  She stopped; her hands went up to her throat.
  
  He, frowning:
  "What do you want .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Mary?
  
  " She lowered her hands
  And stepping backward almost inaudibly said, "I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Came the back way.
  
  I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  came to see Fayne.
  
  " She had hurried
  and was breathing hard.
  
  Lance stared at her,
  And said "Go on in, confess your sins.
  
  " He turned with his
  shoulder toward her; the bleeding bird in his hands
  Stretched itself, thrusting back with the spurs as if it were killing
  its last rival, and suddenly died,
  With a bright bubble of blood in the gaping beak.
  
  Old Davie
  laughed, but not Lance; the little hawk
  Stood up and watched all with intent eyes.
  
  Mary stayed wringing
  her hands and Fayne came from the door,
  Then Mary, half running toward her: "I hardly bear to see
  blood: let me go in.
  
  " Fayne said to Lance:
  "It won.
  
  " "It will lose," he said in his throat, "when my heel is
  on it.
  
  " She, gravely: "It fought well, Lance.
  
  Have you hurt your hands?
  
  " "Ugh," he said, "nothing: the vermin.
  
  "
  He moved toward the little captive, that looked up at him
  With cold intentness; the blood had started again from its broken
  shoulder and striped the dead wing.
  
  Mary Abbey,
  Shrilly, whipping the air with her hands: "Let me go!" Lance
  raised his foot to tread, but the victim's intent
  Concentration of binocular eyes looked human; Mary cried
  shrilly: "They told me, my father said .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And Nina told me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh Fayne!" Lance, suddenly rigid:
  "What's that?
  
  " Fayne answered steadily and said, "Its life
  Is little value to it with a broken wing.
  
  Come into the house.
  
  "
  She answered "I am afraid.
  
  "
  But approached the door, whispering "What kind of a house,
  with blood sprinkled
  Where you enter the door: what have you done?
  
  His hands are red.
  
  " Lance turned from the hawk and said with
  his teeth showing, "Tell your father
  That I may soon be with this," he toed the dead cock, "our
  second-sighted old Scotchman has got a hunch,
  But not with that, not caught alive.
  
  " She fled from him
  To the open door.
  
  Fayne, jerking her face but not
  Her shoulders toward him, said low: "You speak of things
  Less real than nothing.
  
  It is not courage to make
  Danger where there is none.
  
  " She followed Mary Abbey
  Into the door, saying: "Lance is not well.
  
  He loved his brother
  Most deeply, and having heard of venomous talk
  Makes the wound burn.
  
  Have you too been listening
  To our enemies?
  
  " Mary, trembling in the house twilight:
  "I know you couldn't speak calmly, if, if .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh Fayne.
  
  But every person .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What have I done?
  
  " "Will you hush,"
  Fayne said,
  "Mrs, Gomez is probably not interested
  In your girl dreams.
  
  " Then Mary was silent, seeing
  The dark ruler of the kitchen.
  
  Fayne took the iron,
  And said on the stair, "I have to attend to Lance's mother:
  You'd better stay with me.
  
  Then we'll walk.
  
  " At the room door:
  "Mary Abbey is here, Mother.
  
  "
  Mary faltered
  At the air of the room, the stove-heat and stale hangings in the air
  Of wintergreen and eucalyptus.
  
  She stood close to the door,
  And felt the weary mill turn in her mind,
  Unable to think of any definite thing, painfully grinding, turning.
  
  Old Mrs.
  
  Fraser
  Sniffed and said, "I can smell scorching cloth,
  Did you try it with a wet finger?
  
  It ought to sizz
  But if it whistles it will burn the sheets; Mary, are you sick?
  
  You look all blue by the mouth," she wagged her head in the
  pillow, "watch your heart.
  
  " Fayne, kneeling
  To slip the iron under the covers of the bed, tossed back her
  bright hair and said, "She's all right, Mother.
  
  Lance was having a kind of cock-fight in the back yard, that
  struck her pale: she's one of those delicate
  Natures that die at seeing blood.
  
  "
  The weary mill of the mind
  struck a hard kernel and seemed to fall
  Down hollow waters; Mary leaned on the door-frame, clenching
  her fists not to go down with it, biting
  Her white lip, the circle of sight contracted until only the blood-splatch
  of Fayne's hair was visible
  At the hub of the whirlpool.
  
  She slid with her back to the steep
  door-frame and did not fall; Fayne helped her
  To escape the room, the old woman far off proclaiming "It is her heart.
  
  "
  Mary leaned on the newel
  Of the stairhead to find her strength to go down, and said,
  "I am so caught.
  
  And someone has daubed every
  Beam of your house with it.
  
  All women have to bear blood
  But mine has stopped.
  
  Please go first, Fayne,
  For you don't hate me yet; now I can't bear
  To meet .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  anyone.
  
  " Fayne slowly said, "It was Michael?
  
  "
  "I am in terror," she answered, "of every living thing,
  And him, and you.
  
  " Payne's triangular face,
  The high cheek-bones and narrow jaw, thrust in the twilight
  Opposite the other's white oval, as a small perching hawk
  Thrusts with her head, forcing the shapes of things
  To grow alive in the motion of the eyes
  And yield up their hunted secrets: Fayne peered at her,
  Trembling, and said, "Then follow.
  
  "
  They went out the front way;
  No one was seen; Fayne said: "It is horrible to be nearing New Year's
  And still the dust and the sun, as if it could never rain.
  
  Would
  you like to be nurse to that old woman?
  
  She's Lance's mother.
  
  " Mary said faintly, stumbling on the plain
  path, "I have no mother: and the raging
  Blue of your eyes hates me.
  
  " "What you have heard," Fayne said,
  "is only the common lies of the shore.
  
  It's natural for people to furnish a house with lies if it meets
  misfortune.
  
  When a man loses his property
  He's called fool, or thief; when they see you crushed
  By the sudden death of someone you love they begin to hint
  murder; it's human nature.
  
  If you're weak enough,
  Believe them; it won't hurt us.
  
  But what are you here for?
  
  " She
  answered, leaning her hand on the post of the little gate
  To steady her body: "I am not strong like you.
  
  I am in danger
  of killing myself, if .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Or if I believe them.
  
  " "Better than you," Fayne said, "have died.
  
  Come on.
  
  " A little way past the gate,
  Mary said, "What is it?
  
  You too are trembling!" She answered,
  trembling, "Oh no: my life is easy.
  
  Dear,
  We're friends, we mustn't make mysteries; tell me, won't you,
  what's all this web of trouble
  You stare so white through?
  
  You can count on my loving friendship,
  and my
  Forgiveness, if for any reason .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  My worst enemy
  Will call me warm-hearted; and if I once had the name
  Of being a jealous woman in my love for Lance:
  Well," she said with a calm voice, her face twisting
  Like a small white flame specked with flying ashes,
  "That wears, it softens.
  
  And he .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  grows morose and strange,
  Is not perfectly a splendor in my eyes any more.
  
  I will confess that I cannot feel so warmly about him
  As once I did.
  
  .
  
  , .
  
  Here above the beehives, Mary,
  Nobody ever conies, and you could tell me
  Everything safely; and if any advice of mine
  Could help, though I am not wise.
  
  "
  They stood silently,
  Turning their faces away from each other,
  In a wind acrid with stale honey and the life of bees.
  
  Mary Abbey shuddered and said, "I came here
  To tell you.
  
  Oh, Oh.
  
  I used to seem to myself
  Locked in, cold and unwishing; but .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Michael's .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  love
  Made April in me, and the sudden emptiness of death
  Tore .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I was much changed: you remember
  How I clung to you in the desert of the days afterwards,
  And tired you into dislike, until you turned
  Hard eyes toward me.
  
  The first time I saw Lance alone
  He was riding in fire and ashes; he was more unkind
  Than you ever were.
  
  " Fayne tasted
  The crack in her bitten lip, and shut her eyes and said softly,
  "Go on, sweetheart"; but the dark-haired one
  Only wept, and Fayne said, "You've told me nothing,
  Sweetheart.
  
  " She answered, "Are you still really my friend?
  
  Don't look at me," and turned her face from Fayne,
  Saying, "I was so aching lonely.
  
  I only wanted
  To be friends with someone: he really .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  he took me roughly
  On the great lonely hill; it hurt, does it hurt at first
  If you are loved?
  
  " Fayne had stopped trembling and stood
  With bones and teeth showing through the skin of her face,
  And trying to speak moaned slightly, and avoided
  The little blind hand feeling for hers.
  
  "But still I
  Strain and ache to be near him.
  
  " Fayne took the hand,
  And with her unfleshed mouth kissed Mary's hair,
  And tried to speak, and with painful care: "Go .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  on .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Sweetheart?
  
  " "Then they told me that he killed Michael.
  
  That was not true.
  
  Oh yes, I know, but I thought
  If I loved where I ought to hate I would kill myself.
  
  I have always been as regular as the new moon,
  And this time, twelve days have passed.
  
  When I was troubling
  About that, that was when they told me.
  
  I thought
  About a coyote that was caught near our house
  In two steel traps at once, so that it couldn't
  Stand nor lie down.
  
  " Fayne touched her teeth with her tongue
  Until the stretched white lips came slowly to cover them,
  And said, "Do you mean?
  
  " She answered, "I am so caught.
  
  I know, I have a book about it.
  
  So I came here.
  
  Your dooryard was full of blood.
  
  " Fayne said, "Maybe you are.
  
  He's travelled away past caring, and would let
  Nature fly.
  
  I'd naturally .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I have to control my starts, because Lance,
  Who's worth ten thousand of you, hangs on the scale.
  
  D' y' love him, sweetheart?
  
  " She turned her face toward her,
  Saying, "Yes.
  
  " Fayne mumbled and said, "I'd naturally .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It's babies like you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Listen to me.
  
  I took Lance in my hand in that bad night
  To fling at the world.
  
  We do not have to let the dogs judge for
  us.
  
  I told him that we are our own people
  And can live by ourselves: if we could endure the pain of being
  lonely.
  
  Do you think you with Lance
  Could strangle time?
  
  I am holding the made world by the throat
  Until I can make it change, and open the knot that past time
  tied.
  
  To undo past time, and mend
  The finished world: while you were busy teething your young
  virginity.
  
  I have to control myself.
  
  Last year I'd 'a' let
  Nature fly; changed your baby face wi' my hands,
  Sweetheart: but I cannot risk: life has changed.
  
  " "Oh Fayne! why
  did you say .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "I'm not a tame animal,"
  She answered, "the wild ones are not promiscuous.
  
  What would
  you do," her voice thinning to a wire, "if .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Lance .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  If it proved true, that you'd given your little dry heart and careful body
  And anxious little savings of honor
  For a prize to your lover's murderer: could you walk, eat, sleep,
  While you knew that?
  
  " She said, "It is true then.
  
  I had made up my mind: indeed I long for it.
  
  Sleep: Oh, you'll see.
  
  " Fayne drew in breath like one
  Drinking in a desert passion, and said, "You've not
  Enough courage.
  
  " "Not for anything else," Mary answered;
  "But that"; and began to go back down the dry hill.
  
  Fayne followed, with eyes like the blue flame of sulphur
  Under the fever of her hair, and lips reddening.
  
  The moment of joy withered out of her face.
  
  "I am fighting the whole people, do you think I'll risk:
  For the pleasure of a small soft fool's removal,
  Who'd weep it out to her father or leave a letter.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh, you:
  it's not true.
  
  Lance is no murderer, you're innocent as far as that.
  
  I saw with my eyes your unmourned lover
  Clambering up the ledges in his happy drunkenness,
  All alone, and the shale broke in his hands;
  I saw him pitching down the white moonlight,
  And heard the noise like a melon of his head on rock
  In the clatter of the falling pebbles.
  
  Lance came up the sand
  After I screamed.
  
  " Mary Abbey stood swaying and said,
  "If you knew my heart you'd pity me.
  
  " Fayne, amazed: "Pity you
  For having had Lance?
  
  " and said hoarsely, "When did you tell him
  That you think you are pregnant?
  
  " "Oh, Oh," she stammered,
  "Never.
  
  You hate me.
  
  " "You're good at guessing," Fayne said.
  
  "What do you want here, money to bribe a doctor?
  
  We have no money here.
  
  Yet it seems I must help you,
  Or worse will come.
  
  I know a woman in the city .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  When you start east .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But you must promise never to come back
  Into the drawing net of our lives.
  
  "
  X
  When Mary had gone,
  Fayne went where Lance had been; but only the little hawk
  Stood in the dust, hopeless and watchful, with its own misery
  And a shadow of its own, between the privy and the hen-house
  and the back door.
  
  Fayne thought: would Lance
  Be harmed if she should give it the gift?
  
  and fetched the axe
  from the wood-block, but forgot to be merciful
  And went upstairs.
  
  She washed herself, brushed her bright fleece,
  and came down.
  
  She found Lance at the fence-corner
  Where the north pasture comes down to drink.
  
  He had looped
  his belt around the neck of a yearling colt
  That had a head like a barrel; the little body and long knotted
  legs of nature, but the head enormous,
  Like a barrel-headed beast in a dream.
  
  "Oh Lance, what ails it?
  
  "
  He stared at her
  And answered, faintly smiling, "I guess a little
  Message from someone.
  
  " "What?
  
  " she said.
  
  "Nothing.
  
  We don't
  have rattlers
  In the middle of winter.
  
  " "Is it a rattlesnake bite?
  
  "
  "They sleep in the rocks and holes, twisted in bunches,
  They won't strike if you dig them up: but here
  On his lip are the pricks.
  
  " He unhaltered
  The shuddering colt.
  
  "Stumble away, poor thing.
  
  That was a mean trick, to sung the innocent.
  
  "
  Fayne said, "Was it a rattlesnake bite?
  
  " "Mm: but
  What sent it up?
  
  " "This weather," she said, "the vicious sun.
  
  "
  "Fine hawk's-weather, ah?
  
  Did Mary what's-her-name
  Tell you her young sins?
  
  " Fayne quivered, closing her eyes,
  And answered at length, "She's sick.
  
  " "So are we all.
  
  "
  "I am not.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Lance, you are generous: if you found a stranger
  Starving, and gave her .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  him milk and bread, and came
  Home, and you found someone of yours starving;
  Your father, whom you don't love, but you have to owe him
  A kind of duty .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "Why didn't you say brother?
  
  "
  She fixed her eyes on his face and sighed and said, "I am speaking
  Of the living.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And he begged you for the mouthed cup, and what was left
  Of the broken loaf?
  
  " He made a sound of impatience
  And turned, but Fayne took his hand, still marked by pressure
  Of the strap that had held the struggling colt: "Would you let
  him starve?
  
  "
  "No.
  
  What about it?
  
  " "That .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  stranger .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  you fed seems
  to be sorry about it.
  
  I suppose she was starving.
  
  I have some angry rinsings of pride in me
  Make begging bitter.
  
  " "That’s it," he said.
  
  "I could 'a' laughed
  at you
  In the days before I was damned.
  
  I'm learning.
  
  The mares have
  their seasons but women always.
  
  " "I will bear anything,"
  She answered sighing, her narrow white face opaque with tolerance.
  
  "I was not always perfectly patient.
  
  If you were safe I'd have twisted a knife in her fluty throat.
  
  My
  knife is patience.
  
  " "I know the very
  Place," he said.
  
  "Come on, I’ll answer his note.
  
  The very place.
  
  "
  They went up by the dry
  Gully through the starved and naked pasture; the autumn hunger
  of horses and the patient hooves had left
  Hardly roots of the grass, and the yellow dust was reddened with
  sundown.
  
  They saw lean horses drift off
  Along the ridges on the darkening sky, and far on the last knoll
  Three slabs of redwood standing like erect stones, quite black
  against the red streak and slate-color cloud,
  Lonely and strange.
  
  Fayne, breathless with labor up the long
  slopes, cried hoarsely, "Where are you going?
  
  Oh Lance,
  Not there?
  
  " "There," he said.
  
  "No.
  
  I won't.
  
  No.
  
  What agony in you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  not here.
  
  " "On his earth," he answered.
  
  "It would make us despise ourselves.
  
  Oh, do not hate him.
  
  He did no wrong, he was happy and laughing-natured, and dear
  to us all.
  
  " "Come on," he said, "or go home.
  
  Choose.
  
  " She went slowly away down the hill, and returned and
  said, "I love you and I want .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  not what you think,
  But near enough.
  
  And the dead know nothing.
  
  " "I wouldn't bet
  on it," he said; "the drunk did.
  
  " "You are wildly wrong,"
  She answered, "Oh, horribly," and embracing him strained up
  to his throat
  Her whitened lips.
  
  She felt the bare crumbled earth,
  The dark home of the dead and serpents,
  Under her back, and gave herself eagerly,
  Desiring that gift that Mary meant to destroy,
  And herself had never wanted before, but now
  To accept what her rival dared not keep,
  Take and be faithful where the other fled, had some bitter value;
  And faith and the world were shaken; Lance might be lost,
  The past might prove unconquerable: no, she could save him:
  but yet
  She'd bind the future.
  
  This time Lance did not fail.
  
  She feared his caution and schemed against it, quite needlessly,
  For he had wandered beyond prudent thoughts;
  But when they were going away in the twilight, "Ah vile.
  
  Vile," he said, "your hawks have worse poison in their hook beaks
  Than any ground-nest of rattlers.
  
  " She answered, "I am not to tell you
  What my hope is.
  
  " "On top of his bones, dogs in a bone-yard.
  
  "
  She answered languidly and bitterly, "I ought to have let you
  Go to Salinas.
  
  I did not know that your mind .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I would have waited for you all the long years.
  
  I did not know that your mind needed men's judgment
  And the helpless appraisals of the world to help you.
  
  You stood
  so strong,
  Separate, clear, free in my eyes: and I did violence to you
  When I kept you.
  
  " She felt a trembling about him
  And saw that he did not hear but was watching shadows
  Fleet in the air: "Sea gulls.
  
  They are gulls, Lance.
  
  Look how
  beautiful
  The long sharp silent wings in the fading light
  On the bare hill.
  
  " "He took it very quietly," he answered;
  "We are all dogs, every one.
  
  " "Oh," she said, "the world's full
  Of evil and foolishness but it is terribly beautiful.
  
  If you could see that, Lance.
  
  " "What?
  
  By God they won't, not alive.
  
  But then comes hell.
  
  " "I pray you, I pray you, dear,
  Not to begin to think strangely: that's for your father, who often
  Walks his road all staring between hedges
  Of Christs and Satans: but you will rub your mind quiet
  Like the face of a crystal; there is enough to see
  In the dark lovely shoulders of hills, the cows and horses, the
  old gray rocks and the folk around us,
  Without tapping strange dreams.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "Oh, we'll live well.
  
  "
  XI
  The rain held off; for two hundred and forty days there had been
  no rain
  But one sun-drunken shower.
  
  The creek was dry rock and weary
  gray roots; the skin of the mountain crumbled
  Under starved feet; the five carcasses of hawks that Lance had
  hung on the fence-wire dried without odor
  In the north wind and rages of the sun.
  
  Old Fraser walked under
  the moon along the farm-drive beside them,
  Saying, "Lord if thou art minded to burn the whole earth
  And spat off the dust from thy hands, it is well done,
  The glory and the vengeance: but if anywhere
  Rain falls on hills, remember I beseech thee thy servant's placer
  Or the beasts die in the field.
  
  " While he was praying
  The moon was dimmed; he felt a flutelike exultance
  Flow up from the V of his ribs to his wrinkled throat:
  He was not abandoned: and looked aloft and saw
  A little many-colored man's-palm-size cloud
  Coasting the moon from the southeast, the storm-side.
  
  The old man exalted himself; he had power upon God; and
  anxiously
  Repressing his joy for fear it waste the event
  Beforehand, compelled his heart to remember bitterness,
  His two sons lost, one dead, the other in rebellion,
  And poverty and scorn and the starved cattle.
  
  "Oh Lord God,
  As in old time thou didst choose one little people for thine out
  of all the earth,
  So now thou hast chosen one man, one old man, foolish and poor:
  but if thy will was made up
  To punish the earth, then heed not my voice but arise and punish.
  
  It is rank with defilement and infidelity
  And the music of the evil churches.
  
  " He saw a shining white
  form at the garden-gate, and for a high moment
  Believed that some angel, as unto Abraham .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It was Lance,
  Perfectly naked, and Fayne his wife behind him
  Walking in her white nightdress, who spoke pleadingly,
  But Lance went on.
  
  He came with stiff hesitance,
  And seemed not to look down at the latch but opened the gate.
  
  The old man watched and waited in the tool-house shadow.
  
  Lance passed the gate and stood in the open dust
  Like a blind marble pillar-stone, the icy moonlight
  Washing his body, pouring great shadows
  Of the heavily moulded muscles on the hairless breast,
  And the ripple of strength on the smooth belly; he stood
  And babbled and called: "Mikey.
  
  Oh Mikey.
  
  Come home.
  
  I'll be it to-morrow again.
  
  It's getting too dark to play,
  Don't hide any more, buddy, for the owls are out.
  
  If you'll come in I'll let you have my cornelian,
  And the heron's eggs that I found.
  
  " Fayne took his hand,
  "Lance, Lance, wake up," and stroked the smooth power of his arm,
  Her face caressing his shoulder.
  
  He said, "Hurry, they're blaming me.
  
  They think you're lost.
  
  " Fayne said, "I can't bear it, Lance.
  
  Mikey's in the house.
  
  He's come in already.
  
  " The old man
  Came forward out of the shadow; Fayne heard and stared at him.
  
  Lance said, "Damned liar.
  
  Ma's not .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  mare.
  
  People ain't made like .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  dirty .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " and babbled words
  That could not be understood.
  
  Fayne said, "Sleep-walking.
  
  Did he ever before .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what can I do?
  
  " Lance moaned,
  She reached her arm around him and stroked his face
  With the other hand; the old man saw her hair
  Against the wide white breast like a burst of blood
  Deep in the moonlight, then Lance flung her aside
  As white foam flies from the oar, saying still in the dream-drunken
  Sing-song, "Oh no you don't: this is not dog's meat.
  
  Or you'll have to kill it before you paw it.
  
  The angels wi' the hooky beaks .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What in hell," he said
  Sharply, "who's there?
  
  " "I, Lance.
  
  Oh come to bed, dear.
  
  You wandered out in your sleep.
  
  " "No: that spying devil,"
  He said, "Hm?
  
  " "Your father, your father, Lance.
  
  He was here when you came.
  
  " "Oh.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Did I talk?
  
  "
  "Hardly a word.
  
  Nothing, dear.
  
  " "I sleep better
  Alone," he said, "now.
  
  "
  The old man looked up at cloud-flecks
  Like algae breeding on clear deep well-water around the moon,
  And looked at Lance, and returned up the drive.
  
  Lance said,
  "Do you wear white?
  
  Hitch it up on your breast,
  The teat is bare.
  
  Why did he turn away without speaking?
  
  " "He
  saw you'd wakened.
  
  " "Black will look fine,"
  He answered, "wi’ the fiery hair.
  
  I want you to marry again,
  you'll have chances.
  
  "
  The sky in the morning
  Was layered with cloud, and it drove from the southeast; the
  old man kept working his mouth in silent thanksgiving
  For answered prayer; and the wind came down from heaven and
  smoked in the fields.
  
  The sky cleared for a time,
  But that was natural; the wind increased.
  
  It ran quartering the
  little valley; ashes from the hill
  And mountain dust entered all cracks of the house.
  
  It raged on
  the salt pool at the creek sea-mouth
  By the caverned crag that storms have worn spongelike; it reaped
  the heads of the waves on the wide sea, and lay
  Like a quivering steel blade on the necks of the herbless mountains.
  
  Far away northward in San Francisco
  It blew the filth of the street into the faces
  That walked there; one was Mary Abbey's little pale oval
  Lost among thousands.
  
  She moved unevenly, fast and lagging,
  And looked with terrified eyes at the gilt street-number
  Scribed on a window; beyond a mean plush-curtained restaurant
  The number stood over a door.
  
  She stood choking,
  And read on a brass plate in the doorway: "Dr.
  
  Eisendraht,
  Eye, ear, nose, throat"; a wind-scoop of sudden dust
  Blurred the letters and filled her eyes.
  
  She went on
  With faint small steps, and at the street-corner
  Tried to stand still, and was jostled.
  
  Not wearing gloves
  She spurred blood from the back of her left hand
  With the nails of her right: the pain helped her go back
  And enter the door and find the stairway.
  
  She had to sit long,
  Waiting her turn; she was served impersonally
  And dismissed, fainting or able, to the desert wind
  And dust and multitude down the mean street.
  
  At Sycamore Creek
  Lance's mother was wiping the table oil-cloth
  For the noon meal, the film of the wind's dust, and suddenly
  Fell into a chair; Mrs.
  
  Gomez came in with knives and forks on
  the plates and found her, and Fayne
  Came at the cry; they couldn't take her upstairs until Lance came
  in.
  
  They helped her slip to the floor,
  And brought a pillow, then Lance came in.
  
  Fayne said, "She is
  weak but better, the pain is passing.
  
  " The old woman
  Mountainous laid on the floor wished to lie still for a time.
  
  Lance
  knelt by her side.
  
  "All right, Mother.
  
  As long as you like.
  
  Fayne," he said gravely,
  "Will you come to the door a minute?
  
  " Fayne went, and outside
  the door said, "What do you want, Lance?
  
  You scare her
  Wi' that secret look.
  
  " "I was not afraid to go in after him, I want
  you to see him.
  
  The question is
  Whether my eyes have begun to sing lies to me.
  
  He came from the orchard walk and went in the shed.
  
  I know you have courage.
  
  A frightful branding.
  
  Oh," he sighed,
  "That's the point.
  
  " She looked at his face and followed him,
  And reeled in the dry fierce wind in front of the house;
  But he leaning his back on the stiff wind,
  So that his shirt moulded the groove between
  The great bands of lean power from the shoulders: "Well.
  
  Do
  you see him?
  
  In the shed door.
  
  " "No.
  
  " "It was closed, he opened it.
  
  You can see that it's open?
  
  Now I'll catch him.
  
  Come.
  
  " He ran suddenly and leaped the garden gate.
  
  But Fayne must stop to unlatch it, and when she came
  Lance had gone into the shed and around the motor-truck
  That stood within.
  
  Fayne said, "Wind broke the peg
  That held the clasp of the door: see, here's one piece.
  
  That's why it's open.
  
  " She heard the roof straining
  Over the imprisoned storm.
  
  Lance said, "Did he pass you?
  
  Ah?
  
  " She answered, "We must go away from this place.
  
  For you, it's haunted.
  
  Your mother, whom I think you love, is just now
  Lying low between life and death, and you leave her
  To chase the wind, and the foxes of your eyes.
  
  Do you love him so?
  
  Or hate him?
  
  " He answered, "The fire's burnt through his cheek,
  His back teeth grinned at me through the horrible scar.
  
  I'll be there soon.
  
  " "What fire?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Are you dreaming punishment?
  
  Oh, that's the vainest craziest falsehood of all.
  
  Leave that to your poor old father.
  
  " "We go down
  Into blackness," he stiffly answered,
  "And neither you nor I nor the old man
  Knows what happens there.
  
  This was Michael: if I should dream him
  I'd dream the skull knocked in, hm?
  
  What I saw's
  The cheek burnt through.
  
  " "I will not let go and lose you," she
  answered.
  
  "Probably," Lance said, "he'd have lied
  If I could have caught him.
  
  "
  In the afternoon
  Fayne saw from the window above the kitchen a small gray object
  Making a singular dance in the flying dust.
  
  The little hawk which Lance had shot but not killed
  Was dying; they had dropped it a strip of beef that dried in the sun,
  And given it a dish of water, and not again
  Remembered it, though it stood up grimly and watched
  Whoever passed to the privy.
  
  The water was blown
  Out of the dish; no matter, it had never drunk.
  
  Now it was flapping against the wind,
  Fluttering the natural wing and trailing the broken one,
  Grotesque in action as the blackcock at dawn
  Making his dance of love; but this was of death.
  
  In the night Fayne said: "That little hawk died.
  
  Oh, be quiet now;
  You've shot them out of the sky.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Dear, I am to blame
  Like you, and yet I'd be as happy at heart
  As a fed bird that glides through the high air
  If you were not tearing yourself.
  
  " He made no answer,
  She heard the wind tear at the roof, and said,
  "I love this place.
  
  But time has changed, let old Davie
  And your dad farm it now, it is full of memories
  And very fit for old men.
  
  You and I
  Will take three horses for all our share of it,
  And travel into the south by that deer-track
  Where the planted foot is on the face of the mountain and the
  lifted foot
  High over the gray face of the sea: four or five days
  Only the eagles will see us, and the coasting ships
  Our fires at evening, and so on southward.
  
  But when we get to
  Los Angeles, dear,
  You'll put your great white shoulders to work
  For passage-money, we'll sell the horses and ride
  In a ship south, Mexico's not far enough,
  The Andes are over the ocean like our hills here,
  But high as heaven.
  
  " "Fancy-work," he mumbled.
  
  "Ah.
  
  Low as hell.
  
  "
  Fayne said, "No.
  
  Listen: how the air rushes along the keel of the
  roof, and the timbers whining.
  
  That's beautiful; and the hills around here in the cloud-race moon-glimmer,
  round rocks mossed in their cracks with trees:
  Can't you see them?
  
  I can, as if I stood on them,
  And all the coast mountain; and the water-face of the earth, from
  here to Australia, on which thousand-mile storms
  Are only like skimming swallows; and the earth, the great meteorball
  of live stone, flying
  Through storms of sunlight as if forever, and the sun that rushes
  away we don't know where, and all
  The fire-maned stars like stallions in a black pasture, each one
  with his stud of plunging
  Planets for mares that he sprays with power; and universe after
  universe beyond them, all shining, all alive:
  Do you think all that needs us?
  
  Or any evil we have done
  Makes any difference?
  
  We are a part of it,
  And good is better than evil, but I say it like a prayer
  That if you killed him, the world is all shining.
  
  It does not matter
  If you killed him; the world's out of our power, the goodness
  and splendor
  Are things we cannot pervert, although we are part of them
  And love them well.
  
  " He heavily answered: "Have you finished?
  
  Don't speak of .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  him .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  again.
  
  " She began to answer,
  Thought, and was silent.
  
  XII
  She fetched a pair of rawhide panniers
  From the harness wall in the barn, remembering that Michael
  Less than two years ago had whittled the frame, and Lance
  Shaped the hairy leather and stitched it with sinew thongs.
  
  That was the time they three in delight and love
  Rode south by the sea-eagle trails to Point Vicente and Gamboa
  For seven days' hunting, when Fayne shivered with happiness,
  Riding between the most beautiful and strongest man
  For husband, and the gayest in the world for brother, on perfectly
  Wild hills and by rushing streams.
  
  She packed the panniers,
  And balanced the weight, mixing her things with Lance's.
  
  The wind had ceased and no rain had fallen, but the air grown colder
  Whipped up her courage to believe Lance would go,
  And find life, in new places.
  
  His mother was well again;
  And on the farm all things had come to a pause; he was not needed.
  
  The hay-loft was emptying fast; but Lance could not make it
  rain by staying!
  While she packed the panniers
  A little agony was acting under the open window, between the
  parched lips of the creek.
  
  One of those white-crowned sparrows that make sweet voices in
  the spring evenings in the orchard
  Was caught by a shrike and enduring death, not the bright surgical
  mercy of hawks, but slow and strangling.
  
  Its little screams quivered among the gray stones and flew in the
  window; Fayne sighed without noticing them,
  And packed the panniers.
  
  When Lance came up at evening she
  showed him what she had done: "We'll go to-morrow.
  
  "
  He said he'd not leave the place in trouble, "Even dogs are faithful.
  
  After the first good rain I'll go.
  
  "
  The reasons she made only angered him.
  
  Late in January
  Fell rain mingled with hail, and snow in the nights.
  
  Three or four
  calves died in a night, then Lance
  Had occupation with what survived; and the north slopes of
  hills were sleeted with magic splendor
  That did not melt.
  
  Fayne was drying dishes while Mrs.
  
  Gomez
  washed them; she dropped a cup
  With the dazzle of the white hill in her eyes when the sun came
  out;
  Then Lance's mother filled up the door and said,
  "That Mary Abbey is here.
  
  " Fayne answered clearly,
  "I broke a cup.
  
  She is in Idaho I think.
  
  '*
  The old woman: "She's thinner.
  
  Oh Fayne, there were only seven
  Left of the dozen"; she gasped, remembering Michael: six were enough.
  
  "She's got something to tell you.
  
  " Fayne said, "Being out of our net
  Has she flown back?
  
  Where's Lance?
  
  " and passed the old woman
  As one moves a door to pass through a doorway,
  But found no one; neither in the front rooms
  Nor on the garden path when she opened the house-door.
  
  Then she returned to Lance's mother and asked,
  "Where has she gone?
  
  Where was she?
  
  " but found no light in
  the answers,
  Only that Mary looked waxy as a little candle,
  Her heart must be terribly weak, she looked all blue by the mouth,
  And must have come a wet way.
  
  Fayne felt the jealous
  Devil fingering her throat again, tightening her breath,
  And hasted and found Lance; but he was alone;
  In the lower creek-bed, lopping all the twigs from the willows,
  making a load, to be chopped fine
  And mixed with little portions of hay.
  
  She saw him reaching up
  the dwarf stems, as tall as the trees,
  The sky-cold knife, the purple twigs at his feet, and said, "Have
  you seen Mary Abbey?
  
  " "What?
  
  " "Mary Abbey.
  
  "
  "You said she'd gone.
  
  " "Well, she did go: she was up at the house
  just now"; and knowing her own bitter absurdity
  Fayne trembled, saying, "Was she here?
  
  " He looked into the
  hollow creek-bed behind him; what was Fayne seeing
  To make her tremble?
  
  "No," he said.
  
  Fayne, trembling with
  anger: "I'll tell you what she went east for: she was pregnant.
  
  She stopped in San Francisco to be fixed up.
  
  " "That's bad," he
  said; "poor child";
  He slashed the twigs.
  
  Fayne tortured her hands together until
  the pain in the knuckles made her able
  To smell the wounds of the willows and say steadily, "What
  will you do,
  Now she's come back?
  
  " "Oh," he answered.
  
  She stood waiting;
  he slashed the twigs and dropped them, saying, "Let her
  stay there.
  
  I've been thinking, Fayne.
  
  I've been able to think, now the heat's
  broken.
  
  We have no outlet for our bad feelings.
  
  There was a war but I was too young: they used to have little
  wars all the time and that saved them,
  In our time we have to keep it locked up inside and are full of
  spite: and misery: or blindly in a flash:
  Oh," he said stilly; "rage
  Like a beast and kill the one you love best.
  
  Because our blood
  grows fierce in the dark and there's no course for it.
  
  I dream of killing all the mouths on the coast, I dream and dream.
  
  "
  She said, "Will you go to-morrow?
  
  "
  "No.
  
  When the grass grows up.
  
  I'm bound to save what I can for
  the old people, but knives and axes
  Are a temptation.
  
  Two inches of grass.
  
  " She stood gazing; he
  saw the blue of her defenseless eyes
  Glance at his knife-hand.
  
  "Don't be a fool," he said, "I can be
  quiet forever.
  
  Have you seen the old man
  When he looks at me?
  
  I think he knows.
  
  " "That is impossible,"
  Fayne answered.
  
  "Why?
  
  " "For his mind is like
  A hanging rock; he'd go mad when you crossed his eyes.
  
  But if
  he learned it after you'd gone away
  He could absorb it, like the other dreadful dreams that he eats.
  
  "
  He answered, "Davis has known for weeks.
  
  I can tell that.
  
  " "We have friends," she said; "faithful ones.
  
  "
  "Did you say that poor child
  Was .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what did you say?
  
  " Fayne hardened and answered,
  "Your mother saw her.
  
  "
  "I mean .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  no matter," he said.
  
  In the night she lay
  Unable to sleep; she heard the coyotes howl
  And shriek on the white hill, and the dogs reply.
  
  Omens and wraiths waked in her night-weakened nerves,
  Reminders of the vague time when wolves were terrible
  To one's ancestors; and through all the staring-gaps of the night
  She kept thinking or dreaming of Mary Abbey,
  Who had come to the house and then lacked courage to stay,
  and must no doubt
  Be suffering something.
  
  But Lance to-night slept quietly; he'd enjoyed the good fortune
  Of useful and active labor outdoors, in the cold
  Beautiful weather.
  
  He was so concentrated
  On the one spot of anguish
  That nothing else in the world was real to him.
  
  The Abbey girl
  Was never real to him; not even while .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Fayne heard her own teeth
  Chipping each other in the angry darkness .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Nor whether she'd been in trouble.
  
  The little wolves on the hill
  Lifted their tumult into a tower of wailing; Fayne saw clearly
  in her mind the little muzzles
  Lifted straight up, against the starlit gray shoal of snow, and the
  yellow-gray clamor shot up the night
  Like a church-spire; it faded and floated away, the crackling
  stars remained.
  
  "They smell," Fayne thought,
  "The dead calves, and no doubt have found them.
  
  They've feasted,
  And now they sing.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Nothing is real to Lance but his wound;
  But when we get away from this luckless place,
  Which yet I love,
  Then gradually the glory of the outer world
  Will become real; when he begins to perceive the rushing and
  shining storm and fragrance of things,
  Then he'll be well.
  
  "
  A drift of thin rain fell in the morning;
  The white vanished from the hill.
  
  The third day,
  Fayne, going to spy for fear Mary might come
  Where Lance was working, found old Davis in the driveway
  Talking to a tall thin man on a red horse;
  A Spanish man whom Fayne had not seen before,
  But felt that she'd seen the horse.
  
  She eyed them and said,
  "What does he want?
  
  " Davis, turning his back on the stranger,
  Covertly touched his forehead and drooped an eyelid.
  
  "He works at Abbey's.
  
  This is the famous Onorio Vasquez,
  The cowboy that sees the visions.
  
  He wants to tell you: you can
  send him off if you want to.
  
  Have you heard
  About Abbey's girl?
  
  " "What?
  
  " Fayne asked, her eyes narrowed,
  lips thinned.
  
  "He says she put herself out.
  
  The young they ain't got consideration for nobody.
  
  " "What do
  you mean?
  
  " "Jumped off a pier I believe.
  
  A telegram came in their mail yesterday.
  
  Her dad's gone up to
  San Francisco to view the body.
  
  So his hired man can roam.
  
  " Payne's mouth jerked, her eyes
  widened.
  
  "I cannot understand what you mean,
  Davie," she said; but gazed at the Spanish-Indian, the hollow
  brown eyes
  With a bluish glaze across them, in the shadow of his hat, in his
  bony face.
  
  "Jumped off a pier,"
  Davis answered with patient enjoyment; "it seems she kept her
  address in her hand-bag on account of traveling,
  So they telegraphed.
  
  " "Did you say that she died?
  
  " He nodded,
  "Mmhm: wa'n't made for a fish, didn't have gills.
  
  The young ain't got consideration for things like that.
  
  " "Mary!"
  Fayne said, her hand at her throat.
  
  She drew deep breath, and sharply lifting her face toward the
  silent horseman: "What are you waiting for,
  Your news is told?
  
  "
  He, in better English than one expected,
  In the soft voice of his race: "You are very sorry:
  Excuse me, please.
  
  I only saw her a little and she went away
  After I came to work; she was beautiful with patient eyes but
  I think it is often good to die young.
  
  I often wish.
  
  " "She came to this house," Fayne said, "two days
  ago: how could she .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  in the city?
  
  She was here
  The day before yesterday.
  
  " "No, that was the day," he answered,
  "she died.
  
  " Fayne stared at him
  Without speaking; he was half dazzled by the wide blue of her
  eyes below the fire-cloud of hair,
  He looked at the brown earth.
  
  "What time did she .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What time?
  
  " Fayne asked.
  
  "Don't know.
  
  " She said slowly,
  "I think it is .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  strange.
  
  " She hardened.
  
  "Nothing.
  
  Have you come
  To tell us any other thing?
  
  " "Yes," he said proudly,
  "I ride on the hill and see a vision over this house.
  
  You have
  heard of Onorio
  Vasquez?
  
  That is my name.
  
  " Old Davis made a derisive noise
  in his throat; Fayne, thinking "Visions?
  
  Apparently we too .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " said quietly, "I never heard of you.
  
  "
  He, saddened: "It does not matter.
  
  " But Davis, the grizzled
  Thatch of his lip moving to make a smile:
  "Now that's too bad: for the man's famous.
  
  He's got six brothers
  And every one of them knows him, every Vasquez on the coast.
  
  If they can't steal meat nor borrow a string of peppers they listen
  to brother Onorio
  Telling his dreams all through a winter night;
  They don't need nothing.
  
  " She answered, "If you have nothing
  to do here,
  Go and help Lance.
  
  " And to Vasquez: "Tell me what it is
  You have to say.
  
  " "You know a place in the south call' Laurel
  Spring?
  
  No?
  
  " he said.
  
  "Near Point Vicente.
  
  I never been: my brother Vidal has been.
  
  He told me a rock and
  an old laurel tree
  Is cut by the wind into the shape of the rock, and the spring runs
  down.
  
  He made a beautiful place
  The way he told; we are much Indian, we love such places.
  
  "
  Fayne answered, "I am busy just now.
  
  " He: "Excuse me, please.
  
  I ride on the hill and every day
  Watch the old war in the sky over this house;
  I hurt my heart with my eyes.
  
  Sometimes a naked man
  Fighting an eagle, but a rattlesnake bitten him;
  Sometimes a lion fighting a tide of dogs;
  But sometimes terrible armies out of the east and west, and the
  hacking swords.
  
  " Fayne gazed at him
  And said, "Is that all?
  
  I have just heard that my best friend has died:
  I cannot think of these things.
  
  " He said "The two armies
  Destroyed each other, except one man alone
  Walking among the bodies of horses and men
  That blocked the sky; then I heard someone say,
  'Let him lie down with the others.
  
  ' Someone say, 'No.
  
  At Laurel Spring he will wash off the blood,
  And be cured of his wound.
  
  ' I cannot live
  Until I tell you.
  
  " "Is it on the way
  Into the south?
  
  " Fayne said.
  
  "Yes: on the trail.
  
  My brother Vidal .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "I believe many lies
  Are told about us," she said.
  
  "Have you heard talk
  About this house?
  
  " He picked at the hair rope of the halter
  On the horn of the saddle.
  
  She said, "I can guess
  What you have heard.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  May I call you Onorio?
  
  Because it was kind of you to come down; and thank you
  For telling me about your vision.
  
  " She went nearer to him,
  To reach his eyes under the eaves of his hat.
  
  "Do you know Leo Ramirez?
  
  " "Him?
  
  Yes.
  
  " "Have you talked to him?
  
  He could tell you about it.
  
  He and I alone
  Saw my husband's brother climb on the cliff and fall.
  
  Ask him and he will tell you the truth.
  
  The others lie:
  To amuse idleness, I guess.
  
  If they had your great power
  And saw the spirits of the air, they'd never do so.
  
  But would you think the spirits of the dead?
  
  " Her face
  Flashed at him, soft and hard at once, like a wet stone.
  
  "Nothing," she said.
  
  "This present world is enough
  For all our little strength.
  
  Good-bye, Onorio.
  
  If you hear anything
  Come down and tell me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  at Abbeys' or anywhere .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  For nobody comes down to see us any more,
  On account of those wicked .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  lies .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " While she spoke
  A sob broke through and she hid her face.
  
  He from above
  Looked down at her bent head and the wild color
  And foam of her hair; he reached and touched her hair
  As if it were a holy thing.
  
  Fayne, in a moment
  Quelling her tears: "I'll remember
  About the way south, that fountain.
  
  I am very unhappy
  For my lost friend.
  
  " She turned hastily away
  And left him, and found Lance.
  
  She sobbed, "Mary Abbey
  Will never come back.
  
  I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I liked her well enough
  If she had not .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh Lance.
  
  " He was flaying the leather from
  a white and red calf, kneeling to work.
  
  He rested his red-stained hands on the carcass and looked up with
  vague eyes.
  
  Fayne remembered, "At Laurel Spring
  He'll wash the blood .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "Hm?
  
  " he said, "what?
  
  " "Mary .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  What am I doing," Fayne thought, "I oughtn't to tell him
  While his mind is like this"; and clearing her face if she could,
  making a smile, said carefully, "What
  Do you want the skin for?
  
  " "I've nothing to do," he said, "for
  the time.
  
  Rawhide has uses.
  
  I ground my knife
  After all the willows were cut.
  
  Occupation.
  
  " "A sort of bloody
  one," Fayne said carefully.
  
  "Well," he said,
  And tugged at the skin with his left hand, making small cuts with
  the knife against the cling of the flesh.
  
  She stood and watched, and furtively wiped her eyes.
  
  He looked
  up again: "No fat to scrape off.
  
  " He dipped
  The knife in the shrunken flesh between ribs.
  
  "Amazing," he
  said, "how the beasts resemble us, bone for bone,
  And guts and heart.
  
  What did you say about Mary Abbey?
  
  "
  "No," she answered, "nothing.
  
  I was too unkind.
  
  I think how lonely she was.
  
  " "Oh.
  
  You mean Mary Abbey.
  
  I
  wish to God .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  He stopped speaking and tugged the skin, making small cuts
  At the tearing-place.
  
  Fayne said, "Did you ever hear
  Of Laurel Spring, down the coast?
  
  " She saw his wide shoulders
  Suddenly stiffen, a shadow shot over in the air
  And Lance's white-blue eyes rolled after the bird,
  A big black one, with bent-up wing-tips, a flesh-color head
  That hung and peered.
  
  He sighed and pulled at the skin, slicing
  the fiber.
  
  Fayne said, "A vulture.
  
  They're living high now.
  
  " "Mm," he
  said, "they know: they're always stooping over my head.
  
  I thought it was something else.
  
  " "You've shot them out of the
  sky," she answered, "there are no hawks.
  
  " "Aren't there!"
  He said, and hushed.
  
  After a time Fayne left him, and looked back
  When she came to the ridge of the hill.
  
  She saw the brown breast
  of earth without any grass, and the lean brown buckeye
  Thicket that had no leaves but an agony of stems, and Lance
  Furiously stabbing the flayed death with his knife, again and
  again, and heard his fist hammer
  On the basket-work of the ribs in the plunges of the hiltless
  blade.
  
  She returned; when he saw her he was suddenly still.
  
  She said, "Whom were you thinking of?
  
  " He gazed in silence
  as if he thought that he ought to remember her
  But could not.
  
  "Who was being stabbed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  in your mind,
  Lance?
  
  " "Nobody.
  
  We are all dogs.
  
  Let me amuse myself.
  
  "
  "Me?
  
  " she said steadily.
  
  "No.
  
  " She sighed and said, "I was going
  to tell you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I will.
  
  Mary Abbey's dead.
  
  "
  She watched his blood-flecked face and his eyes, but they stood
  still.
  
  "Oh," he said coldly.
  
  "What did she die of?
  
  "
  "Unhappiness.
  
  She drowned herself.
  
  " "Too bad.
  
  " He said no
  more, and Fayne stared and said: "When your mother saw her
  That day, she was not real but a pleading spirit; she was dying
  in the north.
  
  We never pitied her.
  
  "
  "Is she frightened?
  
  " he said.
  
  "Who?
  
  Your mother?
  
  I have not
  told her.
  
  " "Don't then.
  
  "
  XIII
  He stood up slowly,
  And wiped the knife on the hair side of the skin;
  He looked up the darkening wind and said, "It is going to rain.
  
  "
  Fayne said, "Then will you go?
  
  " seeing his fixed face
  Against the lit cloud, so that the sanguine flecks
  And smear under the cheek-bone were not apparent,
  Only the ridge of the face, the unrounded chin
  Higher than her eyes.
  
  He turned in silence and passed
  Heavily over the grassless earth, but soon
  Fayne had to run to keep up.
  
  Near the house
  They came to Davis pouring water into the hand-pump
  Of the old well to prime it; who said, "The water's
  Quit in the pipes; the crick's not dry up yonder,
  I guess a rat in the intake .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Lance answered hoarsely,
  "Fish it out then.
  
  Where's the old man?
  
  " Fayne said,
  "What do you want, Lance?
  
  " "The old man.
  
  " Old Davis gaped
  At his changed face; Fayne saw the water clamber
  Up the sides of the can in the shaking hand
  In little tongues that broke and ran over, "Hey, hey,"
  Davie stammered, "y' got to consider," but Lance touched him
  With only the finger-tips, then the man raised
  One arm and pointed northwestward, slant up the hill.
  
  Lance turned and ran; Fayne followed him, but could not now
  Keep up, old Davis hobbled panting behind them;
  At lengthening intervals the little ridiculous chase
  Crossed over the creek-bed under sycamore trees,
  Past buckeye clumps, and slant up the bare hill
  Below the broad moving sky.
  
  Tall spikes of a tough weed
  With leather leaves grew at a place on the hill;
  A few staring-flanked cows tongued the gray leaves
  But would not crop them, and broke the stalks.
  
  Old Fraser stood
  Against a fence-post and watched; he saw the herd
  A red and white stippling far down the slope, and the serpent-winding
  creek-bed, the salt pool of its end
  Behind the sand-bar, and the sandstone fang in the mouth of the
  valley, from which the shore hills over sky and water
  Went up each way like the wings of a sombre archangel.
  
  Lance
  came from behind
  And said, "I have run my course.
  
  I cannot go on forever.
  
  " The
  old man, broken out of his revery,
  Looked blindly at the wide chest, red hands and stained face, as
  if a pillar of mist had come up and stood
  Threatening above him.
  
  "You," he said harshly, "what do you
  want?
  
  " "Judgment.
  
  I cannot go on alone,"
  And in a boy's voice, "Oh, judgment.
  
  I have done .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I need, I need.
  
  " The old man's brown apelike eyes got him clear
  at length, and became after their manner
  A force of thrusting, like a scorched bar of fire-hardened wood.
  
  "Go home," he said, "drunkard.
  
  If there is no work in the field for your .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  hands .
  
  .
  
  what
  blood is that?
  
  " "My brother's," Lance said.
  
  Fayne came too late,
  And sobbed for breath, in her throat a whining, and said, "He
  was skinning a calf down there, he was .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Lance passed
  Between them and leaned on the fence-wire with his hands together
  and dragged the palms of his hands to the right and left
  So that the barbs of the wire clicked on the bones of his hands
  through the torn flesh.
  
  "And mine," he said.
  
  Fayne heard the tough noise of tearing, and felt in her own
  entrails through the groin upward an answering anguish.
  
  Lance turned, hissing with pain, and babbled: "For no reason on
  earth.
  
  I was angry without a cause and struck him with iron and killed
  him.
  
  The beast in me
  That wants destruction.
  
  I mean Michael you know, Michael I
  mean.
  
  " Old Fraser staggered, saying quietly,
  "Has he had drink?
  
  " Fayne said, "He .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " she looked up at
  Lance's beautiful head and stained gray face,
  But the lower zone of her vision could not avoid his hands, and
  thick blood falling from the shut knuckles:
  Where was that readiness of mind, her thoughts were wailing
  away on the wind like kildeer, which flitter singly,
  Crying all through the white lofts of the moonlight sky, and
  you never see them.
  
  "Am I going to tip over
  For blood, like Mary?
  
  " She stammered: "He .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah God.
  
  I'll tell you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Lance said, "This is mine.
  
  I have
  come.
  
  Keep that woman away from me until I speak.
  
  She fooled me into concealment, time and again, Oh cunningly.
  
  I have fallen through flight after flight of evil
  And harmed many.
  
  " Fayne gathered her mind and said,
  "This is it.
  
  This is the thing.
  
  He made love
  With a girl and she has just died: now he hates me and he hopes
  To take all the sins of the world onto his shoulders, to punish
  himself.
  
  It is all like a mad saint.
  
  You trained him to it.
  
  But I saw Michael .
  
  .
  
  ," Lance said, "I
  remember an iron bolt for my shipwreck
  Stood in my hand": he opened the ripped palm and the red
  streamed: "I struck.
  
  " "Climb," Fayne said,
  "Up the awful white moon on the cliff and fall, I saw him.
  
  It is
  Mary Abbey
  Has killed herself.
  
  " Lance said, "How your power's faded.
  
  You'll
  never
  Fool me or the world again.
  
  I would not die
  Until I had told.
  
  "
  Davis came up, and saw
  Lance head and shoulders against the sky like a dead tree
  On which no bird will nest; the others at his base
  On the brown hill, Fayne saying "Oh weak as water,
  How will this help you bear it?
  
  " Davis, choked
  With haste on the hill: "Ah.
  
  Ah.
  
  What's he been doing?
  
  " Lance held
  His two hands toward his father, suppliant, but clenched
  To save the blood.
  
  "What shall I do?
  
  " The old man
  Stepped backward without an answer.
  
  Fayne said, "Because
  The Abbey girl drowned herself, Lance thinks his finger
  Helped push her down; but she was sick in her dreams
  And might 'a' done it for anyone: the rest's invention
  To punish himself.
  
  I am the one to hate him
  Meddling with that sick child, but I love him
  And will not lose.
  
  " Davis, eyeing certain flakes
  And scraps on the red thorns of the wire, sighed "Ah
  That was a ghastly thing," and stood swaying,
  Yellow and withered.
  
  Old Fraser's burnt wandering eyes
  Fixed on him, the old man said: "Which is the liar?
  
  Did Lance do it?
  
  " Lance opened his palms toward him
  As if they would take and hold, saying "Tell the truth,
  I will not bear to live in the dark any more.
  
  "
  Davis groaned, "Ay.
  
  It's true I guess.
  
  " Fayne: "Ah, Ah, coward.
  
  Because he held his hands at you.
  
  " She said to old Fraser:
  "People hate you and your enemies made this story
  Because you still had a son after Michael died.
  
  This is what they have whispered so long, and Lance has heard it
  And uses it to stab himself.
  
  " Lance said, "It is horrible
  To hear the lies from her mouth like bees from a hive
  Hot in the sun.
  
  I was Michael's death;
  And I cannot bear it in silence.
  
  Only I pray you all to keep it
  Hidden from my mother; you can do that
  With a little care, with a little care, she cannot live long.
  
  Make a story to save her.
  
  " Old Fraser, suddenly
  Covering his face: "Me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  has anyone cared a little to save
  Lest I live to the bitterness?
  
  " He passed among them
  With tottering steps, tasting the way with his hands,
  And down the hill toward home.
  
  Lance stood and muttered,
  "What did he say, did he answer me?
  
  He's honest, I bank on that.
  
  "
  A short way down
  The old man stumbled and nearly falling stood still a moment;
  Then turned his course up the hill and seemed to make haste
  With short weak steps.
  
  Lance watched him and followed soon,
  But turned fiercely on old Davie: "Back to work.
  
  Off.
  
  That rat in the intake.
  
  " And to Fayne: "How death
  Makes even a rat powerful, they swell like clouds.
  
  Leave me, will you.
  
  " She answered, "I will never leave you.
  
  But you, Davie, go home.
  
  " "Hm?
  
  '' Lance said, "never?
  
  You take
  your time.
  
  Tie up my hands then; I think the seepage dulls me
  More than the hurt helps.
  
  Here's a handkerchief:
  Your dress is old.
  
  " She tore it, and while she bandaged him
  They stood, the old man trotted on.
  
  Lance dully wondered:
  "Why did I come to him; because he believes in God?
  
  What the hell good is that?
  
  Hm?
  
  Oh, to put it
  Out of its misery.
  
  " "I know you have been in torture," Fayne said.
  
  "And now you have done unwisely but yet we'll live: not here,
  but certainly, fully
  And freely again.
  
  You might have spared that old man.
  
  Our joined lives are not weak enough to have gone down
  In one bad night.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh Lance," she prayed suddenly, "have
  mercy on me.
  
  While you tear and destroy yourself
  It is me that you tear.
  
  "
  He went on, she followed.
  
  On the high knoll ahead
  Stood the bleak name-posts of those three burials, one new and
  two old, erect against the sinking gray sky,
  And seemed to rise higher as the clouds behind went down.
  
  The
  old man was struggling across a gully this side.
  
  Fayne breathlessly said, "Lance, Lance, can you hear me?
  
  He is
  going up to Michael's grave, where his wild mind, that you've
  Not spared, is to find some kind of fall, some kind of decision.
  
  Do you remember, dear, that you took me
  To Michael's grave a while back?
  
  You were so angry.
  
  But that was the break of our bitter frost.
  
  And maybe there, or maybe afterwards at home in bed: sometime
  you put new life in my body.
  
  Do you remember that I begged you for it?
  
  I could not bear
  That that sick child and not I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Through me you go on, the other threw you away.
  
  Remember,
  whatever destroying answer
  Is to gore us now,
  A spark of your life is safe and warm in my body and will find
  the future.
  
  There is some duty in the parcel
  With being a father; I think some joys too.
  
  But not to destroy yourself,
  Not now I think.
  
  " "Sing to yourself," Lance answered.
  
  "I am sorry if she died sadly, I've worse to think of.
  
  "
  Fayne saw old Fraser, crooked and black against the light cloud,
  Totter up the hilltop and drop himself down
  By the new name-post, but he stood up again
  Before Lance and Fayne came.
  
  He screamed, "Keep off,"
  And picked up clods of the herbless earth and threw them,
  But Lance went up without noticing.
  
  "What must I do?
  
  "
  He prayed, "I cannot live as I am.
  
  " Old Fraser
  Suddenly kneeling covered his face and wept,
  And said, "What has God done?
  
  I had two sons and loved them
  too much,
  And he is jealous.
  
  Oh Lance, was there no silence in the streaming
  world
  To cover your mouth with, forever against me?
  
  I am not.
  
  Not hangman.
  
  Tell your story
  Where it belongs.
  
  Give yourself up.
  
  Must I take you?
  
  " "That's what I thought of at the very first,
  But have been deluded awhile," Lance answered quietly,
  And turned to go down.
  
  Fayne cried, "What good is this?
  
  Oh,
  but how often,
  Father, you have spoken of the godless world: is that what Lance
  is to go to for help and punishment?
  
  When they came to put a serum into your cows, what did you
  say?
  
  You would not trust an old cow to them,
  Will you trust Lance?
  
  If he were as red as Cain .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  when
  hunters come and break down your fences here
  Do we run to the law?
  
  Must we run to it
  For a dearer cause?
  
  What justice or what help or what understanding?
  
  I told him to give his heart
  To the wild hawks to eat rather than to men.
  
  " Lance gripped her
  elbow with the tips of his fingers,
  And pointing at the empty air past the old man: "See, he looks
  pleased wi' me,
  And happy again.
  
  " She looked first at Lance, then at the vacant
  air.
  
  "How could he help but forgive you,"
  She answered, "he knows it was not hatred but madness.
  
  Why must you punish yourself, you loved each other"; and to
  the old man: "Is God's hand lamed?
  
  Tell Lance
  To lean on your God; what can man do for him?
  
  I cannot remember,"
  she said trembling, "how Cain ended.
  
  There were no prisons I am sure?
  
  " Lance said, "He looks well.
  
  No scar at all and his eyes laughing.
  
  Ah, Ah, look:
  He waved his hand at his grave and laughed.
  
  I'll tell you, though,
  He's not real.
  
  Don't mistake him.
  
  It makes me glad,
  But it's bright nothing.
  
  Now it's gone: see?
  
  " The old man, suddenly
  Erect and shaking against the gray cloud: "I will have no part in
  this matter.
  
  It is written that sevenfold vengeance on the slayer of Cain.
  
  Go.
  
  Go.
  
  To be a fugitive and be a vagabond,
  And tramp the earth hard that has opened her mouth for thy
  brother's blood.
  
  No wonder the sweet rain could not fall.
  
  I say flee quickly, before the dogs .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  should I give
  My son to be judged by dogs?
  
  " Fayne said, "Do you hear him,
  Lance, he has answered you.
  
  We must go away south,
  As I've been praying.
  
  " Lance said, "It has all been useless and
  blind.
  
  I am back in hell.
  
  " He sighed and went down
  The way Fayne led, old Fraser behind them crying:
  "If you had listened in the days before: now it is night,
  And who shall hear?
  
  but the sharp feet of pursuers: yet look
  how Christ's blood
  Flows like a fiery comet through heaven and would rain sweetness
  The fields refuse.
  
  "
  Fayne said, "I am going to tell your mother
  That you've got work as foreman on a farm in the south,
  A dairy I'll say, near Paso Robles.
  
  You've got to go and earn wages
  Because we're to have a baby.
  
  But next summer
  She'll see us again: we'll come visiting: do you understand?
  
  You must not let her think that you're going for good;
  She couldn't bear that perhaps; but cheerfully say good-bye,
  You'll save the sorrow, that's your wish, perhaps even
  The ticking of her tired heart.
  
  Can you do it, Lance?
  
  No," she said sadly when she looked at his face.
  
  "I'll say that you've gone ahead.
  
  You had to go suddenly
  To get the job.
  
  " "By God," he said, "I can do my own lying,
  And smooth a face of my own, come on and watch me.
  
  It is my mother.
  
  " "Your hands, Lance.
  
  " He moaned impatiently
  "How will you say they were hurt?
  
  " He moaned, "Hobbled, hobbled.
  
  Never an inch.
  
  That's the first rule in hell,
  Never to step one inch until it is planned.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  In the feed-cutter.
  
  " Fayne said "I daren't.
  
  Yes, at the end.
  
  I'll find clean cloth to bandage them.
  
  You must wash.
  
  Get Davie to help you ready the horses.
  
  The pack is ready, only we must put food in it.
  
  "
  He answered, "I am sick of life.
  
  I have beaten at the last door
  And found a fool.
  
  "
  XIV
  Beyond Abbey's place
  The trail began to wind up to the streaming cloud.
  
  Fayne looked back: Abbey's was hidden, the awful memoried cliff
  Crouched indistinguishable.
  
  Lance said fiercely,
  44What do you see?
  
  " "Nothing.
  
  " Fayne led the packhorse
  To save torture of his hands; Lance rode behind.
  
  He stopped on the rounding of a high fold of the hillside
  And turned himself in the saddle, with his finger-tips
  On the withers and on the croup.
  
  Fayne stopped.
  
  "Did you see,"
  Lance said,
  The look of the man that watched us by Abbey's fence?
  
  "
  "What, Lance?
  
  I am quite sure you are wrong: there has been
  no one
  Since we left home.
  
  " "Then I was mistaken.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I see nobody following.
  
  If they come after me
  I'll kill them; I am not going to be interfered with now.
  
  My trouble's my own affair.
  
  I'd cut my heart out
  To make him live: that's out of the question.
  
  I have beaten like
  a blind bird at every window of the world.
  
  No rational exit.
  
  No cure.
  
  Nothing.
  
  Go on.
  
  No," he said, "wait.
  
  You know it's our last chance to see home.
  
  There are our hills
  but the valley's hidden.
  
  There's Fraser's Point,
  Do you see?
  
  The small jag: like a beak, ah?
  
  And," he said slowly,
  "the curve
  On this side, glimmering along .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  that cliff you know.
  
  Looks like flat shore.
  
  " "Dear," she said faintly, "it would be better
  not to look back.
  
  We're going far.
  
  Come.
  
  "
  "Worn flat I suppose by my thoughts, walking around, up and
  down, walking around.
  
  Don't talk about it.
  
  I can even pick out the hill where we stood this morning, that
  posted hill.
  
  I'm a little run down in health,
  Perhaps these haggles in my hands will poison.
  
  Go on: I've seen
  enough.
  
  "
  Around the corner of the hill, where wet earth hushed
  The stony hooves, "Did you tell me," Lance said,
  "That my mother saw Mary .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what did you tell me
  When she died?
  
  " Fayne felt a tired hope of joy:
  He was thinking of someone else than Michael at least.
  
  "Your mother saw her the day she died; probably the hour
  And very moment.
  
  She thought that she asked for me,
  But when I came, the presence had disappeared.
  
  "
  "What about it?
  
  " he said, "there's no sense in it.
  
  " "No.
  
  That's the manner of .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  spirits.
  
  She had a clear sweet nature,
  Candid and loving.
  
  " Lance answered, "I am much troubled
  About leaving my mother.
  
  The skin looked bluish again
  Around her nostrils; we ought not to have left her.
  
  " Fayne heard
  An angry repeated crying high up in the air;
  She was careful not to look up, but stealthily
  Looked back at Lance; and said, "She was happy, dear,
  When I told her about the baby; she was full of plans.
  
  And we'll write often.
  
  " He was glaring up at the sky,
  His face menacing and pale.
  
  Fayne said, "Lance?
  
  "
  And when he did not answer, herself looked up and watched a
  great soaring bird,
  White-tailed, white-headed, a bald eagle, wide over the mountain
  and shore scribing his arc of flight,
  Tormented by a red-tail hawk that sailed above.
  
  The hawk dived,
  screaming, and seemed to strike,
  The eagle dipped a wing with reluctant dignity
  And sailed his course.
  
  "Oh, you can't kill them all,"
  Fayne said, "from here to Mexico.
  
  " "I don't want to.
  
  They win, damn them.
  
  "
  They climbed at length to the cloudy ridges
  Where the high trail went south; they rode through the clouds
  and in windy clearings
  Would see enormous declivities tilting from the hooves of the
  horses down wells of vapor to the sudden shore's
  Thin white surf on a rock like a grain of sand.
  
  Two or three times
  Fayne heard Lance stop; she sat in the cloud and waited until he
  came.
  
  When the ridge and the trail widened
  They rode abreast; then she saw that he'd stripped
  The bandage from his right hand, but one thin layer
  The wound gaped through.
  
  "Oh Lance, it is all exposed: was it
  too tight?
  
  " "Too stiff.
  
  " "I must fix it.
  
  Have you thrown the linen away?
  
  " He said with a shamed face,
  "Let's be friends, Fayne.
  
  I feel somebody
  Behind us; and I can tell you I won't be caught.
  
  I have my gun:
  I can't manage the trigger
  Wi' that muff on my hand.
  
  " "You are right," she answered with
  a flash of joyful fear; "but it is certain
  That no one's following.
  
  Your wrist looks swollen.
  
  " "No," he
  said; "but it is strange and pleasant to have left the place
  Along with you.
  
  Your hair is like a fire in the cloud.
  
  " She answered,
  "We have changed worlds.
  
  " "Wait for me,"
  He said, and turned and went back.
  
  Hearing him speak, but not
  able to see him through the blind vapor,
  She struggled in a kind of nightmare to turn the packhorse
  To go back to him; she dropped the hair rope and struck
  Her mount with fists and heels.
  
  As it leaped, Lance
  Grew out of the fog, towering on his little horse.
  
  "What was it?
  
  What did you see?
  
  " "Ah, nobody.
  
  I could ‘a’ sworn.
  
  "
  He was always listening as they went on,
  And looking back, if the steam of the world cleared
  Over the draft from a gorge.
  
  Fayne suddenly stopped
  In the blind coil and drizzle of the cloud.
  
  "Are you there, Lance?
  
  Are you all right?
  
  " "Hm?
  
  Yes," he answered, "I know it.
  
  But I never can see him.
  
  " Fayne said quietly, "Perhaps he is.
  
  As when your mother saw Mary Abbey.
  
  But they're not real,
  As you and I are, and the hard mountains and the horses and the
  wet cloud.
  
  He is not an enemy; we never
  A moment hated him, but always loved and were sorry.
  
  But he
  is only an echo of our own troubled
  And loving thoughts.
  
  " Lance laughed like the sudden bark of a
  dog: "Eavesdroppers
  Have got to take what they get.
  
  But what's real, ah?
  
  How do you
  know?
  
  " "I never thought of it," she answered,
  "But I can tell you.
  
  What eyes, ears, fingers, can feel; and come
  again the next day
  And feel again: that's real.
  
  You may see visions but you cannot
  touch them; but if you could touch them too,
  Yet they don't last.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Did you ever hear of a place called
  Laurel Spring?
  
  " "No.
  
  Any water would do.
  
  It's growing toward night.
  
  " "I was thinking about a man named
  Vasquez," she answered,
  "That sees visions.
  
  "
  The trail had come lower,
  They rode in dropping skeins of the cloud, a slight cattle-track
  On a steeple-roof slope so sheer and high
  That every stone the hooves kicked out rolled down
  Into deep water; but had dwindled from sight down the pitch of
  distance
  The first quarter of its fall.
  
  The sea-west heaven
  Opened an eye, whence the last of the sun
  Flamed, like a fire fallen into a well
  Flashing before it is drowned, that makes the black disk of water
  As bright as blood; and the wild angry light streams from the
  bottom up the stained wall
  And washes with color every cold stone: so from the floor of the
  world a fountain and flood of roses
  Flew up to the height, those two riders might have seen
  Their own blue shadows on the red cloud above them;
  Then the eye of the west closed.
  
  Color was there
  But no radiance, here the gray evening gathered.
  
  Lance's mount suddenly stumbled; Fayne cried out;
  And they rode on.
  
  Lance said, "Now he's ahead of us;
  The horse shied when he passed; I couldn't see him.
  
  It's trembling still.
  
  " Fayne said, "No wonder.
  
  If it had fallen
  It would roll from here to the sea; oh, keep your feet
  Light in the stirrups.
  
  Your bay's getting too old, Lance.
  
  To-morrow it must take the pack; you'll ride the pinto.
  
  "
  "To-morrow!" he said.
  
  Fayne turned and looked and said nothing,
  feeling intolerable sadness
  Grow over her mind like the gray darkness covering the world;
  for a moment it seemed they were not escaping
  But only dragging the trap; and the twilight darkened.
  
  There
  was no stopping here;
  They rode like flies upon the face of a wall;
  The tired horses must stick if they could, and go in darkness
  Until some flat place found.
  
  Fayne was tired too,
  And shook in the cold.
  
  "Lance, Lance, ride carefully.
  
  If you should fall I'll follow.
  
  I will not live
  Without you.
  
  " He laughed, "Ha!" like the bark of a dog.
  
  "No danger here, we are going in the perfect owl's eye.
  
  Michael has gone ahead to make ready for us.
  
  You know: a camp.
  
  " "What?
  
  " she said.
  
  "You know: a camp.
  
  We'll come to it.
  
  " "Oh Lance, ride carefully.
  
  " A kind of shoulder
  on the wall
  Showed in the dark, and a little noise
  That Fayne thought was the sea.
  
  Lance called behind her,
  "Hello.
  
  Are you there?
  
  " She said, "Here, Lance.
  
  " "Uhk-hm.
  
  The other fellow; not you.
  
  " She thought "I can't bear it,"
  And said quietly, "It's water my horse has found.
  
  It must be a little creek; I can hear it falling.
  
  "
  They stopped and drank under the whispering bushes,
  And found no place to lie down.
  
  There were no stars,
  But three ships' lights crept on the cavernous depth
  And made a constellation in the under-world;
  Lance said, "Damn you, go on.
  
  " Fayne understood
  By the useless curse how his mind stared.
  
  The horses
  Paced on with heads down, and around the fold of the hill
  Stopped of themselves.
  
  Here in a shallow gully
  There seemed to be room to camp, between the sharp slope
  And a comb of bushes.
  
  Fayne saw a glimmer move in the dark
  And sobbed to restrain a cry; it was Lance's hand
  From which he had slipped the bandage; the wound and its wet
  exudate
  Shone phosphorescent: the right hand: the hand that had done it.
  
  Or can pain shine?
  
  In a moment Fayne thought more quietly:
  "Is it infected, could infection shine in the dark like decaying
  wood?
  
  " He was feeling the earth for sticks
  To start a fire: she dipped in the pannier and found the matches.
  
  In the red firelight she examined his hand:
  Feverish, a little; but less than his lips and eyes: Oh, when would
  the strain end?
  
  "Let's make a big fire,
  This our first night of freedom, and keep ghosts away.
  
  " She took
  the short-handled axe from the pannier side
  And broke dead wood with it.
  
  "We'll make a bright eye up here
  for the night, in the high blackness, for the hollow night,
  For the ships to wonder what star .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I'll tell you what star,
  You streaming ships: the camp-fire of Lance and Fayne is the
  star; we are not beaten, we are going to live.
  
  We have come out of the world and are free, more hawk than
  human, we've given our hearts to the hawks to keep
  In the high air.
  
  " Lance laughed, "Ha! Owls you mean.
  
  Welcome.
  
  "
  He kept his hands
  From the fire-heat, and would take no food.
  
  XV
  The famished horses
  Moved in the dark; Lance ground his teeth in sick sleep;
  Wind whispered; the ocean moaned; that tinkling water
  Fell down the rock.
  
  Fayne lay and was cold; she wondered
  Whether it was Laurel Spring perhaps; then perfectly knowing
  That all the leaves were oak, she was compelled
  To creep away in the darkness and crush leaves
  To smell their nature.
  
  "I was not like this
  A year ago," she thought wistfully, "to lie wakeful
  And stare at the words of a fool; in the high sweetness
  Of mountain night.
  
  " Her solitary mind
  Made itself a strange thought: that Lance would be saved and well,
  But she herself would die at the baby's birth,
  After some happy months: it seemed to lead hope
  Into the line of nature again; for nobody ever
  Comes off scot-free.
  
  She slept a little; Lance woke
  And felt his hands aching, and thought, "It cannot be true
  That I killed.
  
  Oh yes, it is.
  
  At every waking.
  
  And there is no way to change it.
  
  " Night was grown pale
  In the way to dawn, and many dark cold forms
  Of bush and rock stood quietly.
  
  But moving creatures
  Troubled the stillness, Lance heard the steps of pursuit
  Along the trail from the north, more than one rider;
  Then his long-frustrate and troublesome life
  Flaming like joy for the meeting, shook its bewildered elements
  To one sharp edge.
  
  He was up, and moved quietly,
  Willing to let Fayne sleep, in the sunset cloud
  And pillow of her hair.
  
  His puffed hot fingers buckled
  In a moment without fumbling the bolstered belt
  That had the gun; he caught the short-handled axe
  That magnetlike drew his hand; and the world was suddenly
  Most cool and spacious.
  
  Four lean steers
  Led by a barren cow were along the path.
  
  They had come to drink in the dawn twilight, and now
  Remembered a grass-plot southward.
  
  Where Lance met them
  The trail was but a hair of passage stepped in the face
  Of a leaning clay cliff; the leader stopped,
  Was pushed from behind, and trying in her fear to turn,
  Splayed with both forefeet over the slippery edge,
  Felt the axe bite her neck; so leaping out blindly
  Slid down the pit.
  
  They were horsemen to Lance, his enemies,
  Albeit a part of his mind was awake and faintly
  Knew what they were; the master part willed them to be
  Men pursuing a murderer; they were both cattle and men
  At the one moment.
  
  For being men, hated; for being cattle,
  The hand was more free to strike, the fiery delight
  More pure of guilt.
  
  The steer came on, not angrily,
  Dull and unable to turn, dipping his new-moon horns,
  Lance whining with joy and reckless of his own body
  With both hands on the axe-helve drove the sharp steel
  Into the shoulder; it broke right through the shoulder-blade
  And nicked the broad ribs below.
  
  At the same moment
  The curve and base of a horn found Lance's thigh
  And pushed; but he with his weight flung forward
  In the fury of the axe-blow went over the head
  Onto the shoulder, and a moment clung there, as when an old
  mountain-lion
  Has hunted under the spite of fortune for many days, until his
  bright hide is ruffled, and the ribs
  Lift up the hair; he comes by a secret way and crouches in the
  alder leaves an hour before dawn
  Over a pool where the deer drink; but not a deer but a cow-elk
  comes to the pool,
  And stands in the glimmer and the trembling twilight, and stoops
  her head: the puma watches, his lustful mind
  Can even taste the hot flesh through the rough hide, and smell the
  soft heavy fountain of blood: he springs,
  And sticks on the shoulder, blunting his teeth against the great
  bones of the neck; but the elk does not fall,
  But runs, and beats her death against the low branches, and scrapes
  him off:
  So Lance fell off from the steer's shoulder, and was ground
  Between the flank and the cliff, as the numbed foreleg
  Failed and recovered.
  
  The weight lifting, he stood
  With his back to the steep wall and violently
  Pushed the great hairy quarters with all his power
  Of both his arms; the hind hooves fell over the edge,
  And the forelegs, one crippled, scraped the stiff clay
  In vain for foothold, the great hurt bulk went down
  Standing, but fell in a moment and slid in the chasm.
  
  The others had turned and fled.
  
  Fayne saw her lover
  Come swaying and shining against the gray sky
  Over the abyss of darkness, and she had seen the steer fall.
  
  Lance held the axe.
  
  "Ah, Ah," Fayne cried, "strike then.
  
  Strike.
  
  Finish it.
  
  We have not lived pleasantly,
  And I have failed.
  
  " He threatened her, laughing with pleasure.
  
  "I have not had such pleasure in the days of my life.
  
  Did the dogs think they were hunting rabbit?
  
  Surprised them, ahf
  ah?
  
  " She said, "Your hands have opened again
  And dripping fast.
  
  " "More?
  
  " he said, hearing the horses that
  stamped and snorted beyond.
  
  "Oh, good.
  
  If they get me,
  Remember it's a grand end.
  
  " He ran and struck
  The nearest; it was holding its head ready for the axe, backing and
  straining
  On the taut halter, and went down on its knees; the second stroke
  Chopped horribly along the neck, the third ended the pain.
  
  Lance
  crouched and looked at the head, and wearily
  Rose, and said slackly, "There was no way out, here, either.
  
  My
  own horse you see.
  
  I must 'a' been .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I have been troubled.
  
  Bearing my face on every glass gap and porthole .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And get a beaten face.
  
  Were those more horses?
  
  " Fayne had stood rigid; she said,
  "Steers.
  
  " "Why didn't they shoot?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Steers.
  
  Tbafs it.
  
  Yet I hate blood.
  
  See how it springs from the ground: struck oil at last, ah?
  
  I felt like this, that time.
  
  So we've tried a long time
  And never found
  My exit: I think there's none: the world's closed.
  
  A brave fellow, a tethered horse.
  
  A natural butcher.
  
  "
  One of the fallen forelegs
  Paddled its hoof on the earth and Lance said faintly, "I've come to
  the point
  I cannot even put him out of his pain.
  
  "
  He dropped the red axe; Fayne saw his own blood spring from his palm
  When he let go.
  
  "I think," he said, "have I got the gun on me?
  
  Will you finish him off?
  
  " "He is dead," she answered.
  
  "Listen, Lance.
  
  " Her throat was twisting and beating upward
  with hot nausea; she swallowed and said,
  "Dearest.
  
  This is only a stumble on the way.
  
  We are going on.
  
  You will be well after this.
  
  You are dreadful with blood but you are too beautiful
  And strong to fail.
  
  Look, dear,
  How the clear quivering waters and white of dawn fill the whole
  world; they seem to wash the whole mountain
  All gently and white, and over the sea, purifying everything.
  
  If
  I were less tired
  I could be full of joy.
  
  " She pressed her hands to her throat and
  swallowed and said, "Where you and I
  Have come to, is a dizzy and lonely place on a height; we have to
  peel off
  Some humanness here or it will be hard to live.
  
  If you could think
  that all human feelings, repentance
  And blood-thirst too, are not very important in so vast a world;
  nor anyone's life;
  Nor love either, the unlucky angel
  That has led me so far: we'll go on, we'll not fail.
  
  All over the
  mountain
  The eagles and little falcons and all the bright cold hawks
  you've made friends with them now are widening
  Their wings to wash them in the cool clearness, and over the
  precipices launching their bodies like ships
  On the high waves of dawn.
  
  For us too
  Dawn brings us wandering; and any ghost or memory that wants
  to follow us will be sore in the feet
  Before the day's end.
  
  We're going until the world changes, you
  and I like the young hawks
  Going hunting; we'll take the world by the throat and make him
  give us
  What we desire.
  
  "
  He stood bent over, smiling sidewise, watching
  the drip from his hands, and said,
  "You do it quite bravely.
  
  No doubt you are right, and I must
  take your guidance without a word
  From this time on.
  
  What next?
  
  I'll go wash.
  
  Faugh.
  
  What a hell of red to be stuck in; you're out o' luck,
  Loving a butcher.
  
  " She answered with her hands at her mouth,
  struggling against her sickness, "I'll come in a moment
  And help you to clean your hands and bandage them again.
  
  " He
  went back by the trail, but she
  Vomited with grievous labor a little water and followed him.
  
  Now all the world was quite clear
  And full of dawn, so that Fayne saw from the trail
  The jutting shoulder of the hill, guessed at in darkness,
  Was a great rock, lengthened by thick hard foliage
  Of mountain laurel, which grew above it, and the wind had carved
  Into the very nature and form of the rock
  That gave it shelter, but green for gray.
  
  She remembered
  With a wild lift of the heart, "He'd wash the blood
  In Laurel Spring, and be healed of his wounds,"
  But Lance had not gone to the stony basin, but stood
  Out on the ledge of the rock, and was looking down
  The straight vast depth, toward the beauty of the ocean
  Like a gray dove's breast under the dawn-light.
  
  She could not
  call to him
  Before he leaped and went down.
  
  He was falling erect
  With his feet under him for a long time,
  But toward the bottom he began turning in the air.
  
  One of the roots of the mountain concealed his end
  On the shore rocks.
  
  Fayne lay down in the trail
  And thought that when she was able she would go down to him,
  One way or another.
  
  ".
  
  .
  
  .
  
  That would be happiest.
  
  But then he'd be extinguished forever, his last young spark
  That lies warm in my body, bought too dear
  For gulls to eat .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and I never could help you at all,
  And now has come the wild end.
  
  I could not keep you, but your child in my body
  Will change the world.
  
  "
  She climbed slowly down,
  Rock to rock, bush to bush.
  
  At length she could see him
  Lying softly, and there was somebody bending above hinif
  Who was gone in a moment.
  
  It was not so dreadful
  As she had feared; she kissed the stained mouth,
  And brought smooth stones from the shore until she had covered
  Her love against the vultures and salty gulls;
  Then climbed up, rock to rock, bush to bush.

• Give Your Wish Light Read Poem Log in to favourite

  By day and night dream about happy death,
  Poor dog give your heart room, drag at the chain,
  Breathe deep at dawn, wish it were the last breath,
  Imagine the leaden ball planted in the brain,
  The seed of that superb flower, dream the brave noose
  That loves the neck so dearly it lets the life loose,
  Dream the fierce joys of war where men like drunken
  Jesuses fling the supreme gift at each other,
  "Take blessedness, take it deep in your breast, brother .
  
  .
  
  Dream on, dream all these joys, life might look shrunken
  In lack of dreams.
  
  Give your wish light, give it room.
  
  You know you will never untimely attempt the tomb.
  
  Go in to your bride by daylight before the crowd
  As if sweet death were a whore?
  
  You are too proud.

• Going To The Horse Flats Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Amazingly active a toothless old man
  Hobbled beside me up the canyon, going to Horse Flats, he said,
  To see to some hives of bees.
  
  It was clear that he lived alone and
  craved companionship, yet he talked little
  Until we came to a place where the gorge widened, and deer-hunters
  had camped on a slip of sand
  Beside the stream.
  
  They had left the usual rectangle of fired
  stones and ashes, also some crumpled
  Sheets of a recent newspaper with loud headlines.
  
  The old man
  rushed at them
  And spread them flat, held them his arm's length, squinting
  through narrowed eyelids poor trick old eyes learn, to make
  Lids act for lens.
  
  He read "Spain Battle.
  
  Rebels kill captives.
  
  City
  bombed Reds kill hostages.
  
  Prepare
  For war Stalin warns troops.
  
  " He trembled and said, "Please read
  me the little printing, I hardly ever
  Get to hear news.
  
  " He wrung his withered hands while I read;
  it was strange in that nearly inhuman wilderness
  To see an old hollow-cheeked hermit dancing to the world's
  echoes.
  
  After I had read he said "That's enough.
  
  They were proud and oppressed the poor and are punished for
  it; but those that punish them are full of envy and hatred
  And are punished for it; and again the others; and again the
  others.
  
  It is so forever, there is no way out.
  
  Only the crimes and cruelties grow worse perhaps.
  
  " I said, "You
  are too hopeless.
  
  There are ways out.
  
  "
  He licked his empty gums with his tongue, wiped his mouth and said
  "What ways?
  
  " I said "The Christian way: forgiveness, to forgive
  your enemies,
  Give good for evil.
  
  " The old man threw down the paper and
  said "How long ago did Christ live?
  
  Ah?
  
  Have the people in Spain never heard about him?
  
  Or have the Russians,
  Or Germans?
  
  Do you think I'm a fool?
  
  " "Well," I said to try
  him, "there's another way: extermination.
  
  If the winning side will totally destroy its enemies, lives and
  thoughts, liquidate them, firing-squads
  For the people and fire for the books and records: the feud will then be
  Finished forever.
  
  " He said justly, "Yoiire the fool," picked up
  his bundle and hurried through the shadow-dapple
  Of noon in the narrow canyon, his ragged coat-tails flapping like
  mad over the coonskin patch
  In the seat of his trousers.
  
  I waited awhile, thinking he wished
  to be quit of company.
  
  Sweet was the clear
  Chatter of the stream now that our talk was hushed; the flitting
  water-ouzel returned to her stone;
  A lovely snake, two delicate scarlet lines down the dark back,
  swam through the pool.
  
  The flood-battered
  Trees by the stream are more noble than cathedral-columns.
  
  Why
  do we invite the world's rancors and agonies
  Into our minds though walking in a wilderness?
  
  Why did he
  want the news of the world?
  
  He could do nothing
  To help nor hinder.
  
  Nor you nor I can .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  for the world.
  
  It
  is certain the world cannot be stopped nor saved.
  
  It has changes to accomplish and must creep through agonies
  toward new discovery.
  
  It must, and it ought: the awful
  necessity
  Is also the sacrificial duty.
  
  Man's world is a tragic music and is not
  played for man's happiness,
  Its discords are not resolved but by other discords.
  
  But for each man
  There is real solution, let him turn from himself and man to love
  God.
  
  He is out of the trap then.
  
  He will remain
  Part of the music, but will hear it as the player hears it.
  
  He will be superior to death and fortune, unmoved by success
  or failure.
  
  Pity can make him weep still,
  Or pain convulse him, but not to the center, and he can conquer
  them.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But how could I impart this knowledge
  To that old man?
  
  Or indeed to anyone?
  
  I know that all men
  instinctively rebel against it.
  
  But yet
  They will come to it at last.
  
  Then man will have come of age; he will still suffer and still die,
  but like a God, not a tortured animal.

• Granite And Cypress Read Poem Log in to favourite

  White-maned, wide-throated, the heavy-shouldered children of
  the wind leap at the sea-cliff.
  
  The invisible falcon
  Brooded on water and bred them in wide waste places, in a bridechamber
  wide to the stars' eyes
  In the center of the ocean,
  Where no prows pass nor island is lifted .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the sea beyond
  Lobos is whitened with the falcon's
  Passage, he is here now,
  The sky is one cloud, his wing-feathers hiss in the white grass,
  my sapling cypresses writhing
  In the fury of his passage
  Dare not dream of their centuries of future endurance of tempest.
  
  (I have granite and cypress,
  Both long-lasting,
  Planted in the earth; but the granite sea-boulders are prey to no
  hawk's wing, they have taken worse pounding,
  Like me they remember
  Old wars and are quiet; for we think that the future is one piece
  with the past, we wonder why tree-tops
  And people are so shaken.
  
  )

• Gray Weather Read Poem Log in to favourite

  It is true that, older than man and ages to outlast him, the Pacific surf
  Still cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum;
  But there's no storm; and the birds are still, no song; no kind of excess;
  Nothing that shines, nothing is dark;
  There; is neither joy nor grief nor a person, the sun's tooth
  sheathed in cloud,
  And life has no more desires than a stone.
  
  The stormy conditions of time and change are all abrogated, the essential
  Violences of survival, pleasure,
  Love, wrath and pain, and the curious desire of knowing, all perfectly
  suspended.
  
  In the cloudy light, in the timeless quietness,
  One explores deeper than the nerves or heart of nature, the womb or soul,
  To the bone, the careless white bone, the excellence.

• Hands Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
  The vault of rock is painted with hands,
  A multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men's palms, no more,
  No other picture.
  
  There's no one to say
  Whether the brown shy quiet people who are dead intended
  Religion or magic, or made their tracings
  In the idleness of art; but over the division of years these careful
  Signs-manual are now like a sealed message
  Saying: "Look: we also were human; we had hands, not paws.
  
  All hail
  You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters
  In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down
  And be supplanted; for you also are human.
  
  "

• Hellenistics Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I look at the Greek-derived design that nourished my infancy
  this Wedgwood copy of the Portland vase:
  Someone had given it to my father my eyes at five years old
  used to devour it by the hour.
  
  I look at a Greek coin, four-drachma piece struck by Lysimachus:
  young Alexander's head
  With the horns of Ammon and brave brow-ridges, the bright
  pride and immortal youth and wild sensitiveness.
  
  I think of Achilles, Sappho, the Nike.
  
  I think of those mercenaries
  who marched in the heart of Asia
  And lived to salute the sea: the lean faces like lance-heads, the
  grace of panthers.
  
  The dull welter of Asia.
  
  I am past childhood, I look at this ocean and the fishing birds, the
  streaming skerries, the shining water,
  The foam-heads, the exultant dawn-light going west, the pelicans,
  their huge wings half folded, plunging like stones.
  
  Whatever it is catches my heart in its hands, whatever it is makes
  me shudder with love
  And painful joy and the tears prickle .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the Greeks were not
  its inventors.
  
  The Greeks were not the inventors
  Of shining clarity and jewel-sharp form and the beauty of God.
  
  He was free with men before the Greeks came:
  He is here naked on the shining water.
  
  Every eye that has a
  man's nerves behind it has known him.
  
  II
  I think of the dull welter of Asia.
  
  I think of squalid savages along
  the Congo: the natural
  Condition of man, that makes one say of all beasts "They are
  not contemptible.
  
  Man is contemptible.
  
  " I see
  The squalor of our own frost-bitten forefathers.
  
  I will praise the
  Greeks for having pared down the shame of three vices
  Natural to man and no other animal, cruelty and filth and superstition,
  grained in man's making.
  
  III
  The age darkens, Europe mixes her cups of death, all the little
  Caesars fidget on their thrones,
  The old wound opens its clotted mouth to ask for new wounds.
  
  Men will fight through; men have tough hearts.
  
  Men will fight through to the autumn flowering and ordered
  prosperity.
  
  They will lift their heads in the great cities
  Of the empire and say: "Freedom?
  
  Freedom was a fire.
  
  We are
  well quit of freedom, we have found prosperity.
  
  "
  They will say, "Where now are the evil prophets?
  
  " Thus for a
  time in the age's afterglow, the sterile time;
  But the wounds drain, and freedom has died, slowly the machines
  break down, slowly the wilderness returns.
  
  IV
  Oh distant future children going down to the foot of the mountain,
  the new barbarism, the night of time,
  Mourn your own dead if you remember them, but not for civilization,
  not for our scuttled futilities.
  
  You are saved from being little entrails feeding large brains, you
  are saved from being little empty bundles of enjoyment,
  You are not to be fractional supported people but complete men;
  you will guard your own heads, you will have proud eyes.
  
  You will stand among the spears when you meet; life will be
  lovely and terrible again, great and in earnest;
  You will know hardship, hunger and violence: these are not the
  evils: what power can save you from the real evils
  Of barbarism?
  
  What poet will be born to tell you to hate cruelty
  and filth?
  
  What prophet will warn you
  When the witch-doctors begin dancing, or if any man says "I
  am a priest," to kill them with spears?

• Hooded Night Read Poem Log in to favourite

  At night, toward dawn, all the lights of the shore have died,
  And the wind moves.
  
  Moves in the dark
  The sleeping power of the ocean, no more beastlike than manlike,
  Not to be compared; itself and itself.
  
  Its breath blown shoreward huddles the world with a fog; no stars
  Dance in heaven; no ship's light glances.
  
  I see the heavy granite bodies of the rocks of the headland,
  That were ancient here before Egypt had pyramids,
  Bulk on the gray of the sky, and beyond them the jets of young trees
  I planted the year of the Versailles peace.
  
  But here is the final unridiculous peace.
  
  Before the first man
  Here were the stones, the ocean, the cypresses,
  And the pallid region in the stone-rough dome of fog where the moon
  Falls on the west.
  
  Here is reality.
  
  The other is a spectral episode: after the inquisitive animal's
  Amusements are quiet: the dark glory.

• Hope Is Not For The Wise Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools;
  Change and the world, we think, are racing to a fall,
  Open-eyed and helpless, in every newscast that is the news:
  The time's events would seem mere chaos but all
  Drift the one deadly direction.
  
  But this is only
  The August thunder of the age, not the November.
  
  Wise men hope nothing, the wise are naturally lonely
  And think November as good as April, the wise remember
  That Caesar and even final Augustulus had heirs,
  And men lived on; rich unplanned life on earth
  After the foreign wars and the civil wars, the border wars
  And the barbarians: music and religion, honor and mirth
  Renewed life's lost enchantments.
  
  But if life even
  Had perished utterly, Oh perfect loveliness of earth and heaven.

• Hurt Hawks Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  
  The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
  The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
  No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
  And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
  Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
  
  He stands under the oak-bush and waits
  The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
  And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
  
  He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
  
  The curs of the day come and torment him
  At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
  The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
  
  The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
  That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
  
  You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
  Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
  Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.
  
  II
  
  I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
  Had nothing left but unable misery
  From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
  
  We had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom,
  He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
  Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
  Implacable arrogance.
  
  I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
  
  What fell was relaxed,
  Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
  Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
  Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

• In The Hill At New Grange Read Poem Log in to favourite

  ONE OF THE THREE GREAT PREHISTORIC
  BURIAL MOUNDS ON THE RIVER BOYNE
  Who is it beside me, who is here beside me, in the hollow hill?
  
  "
  A foreigner I am.
  
  "You've dug for nothing.
  
  The Danes were here
  A thousand years before you and robbed me of my golden bracelets,
  Stinking red-haired men from the sea, with torches and swords.
  
  "
  Dead king, you keep a better treasure than bracelets,
  The peace of the dead is dearer than gold, no one can rob you.
  
  What do you watch, old king, from the cave?
  
  "In the north the
  muddy chippers of flint on the Antrim coast,
  Their chests covered with hair and filth, shrewd eyes under
  bushes of brow, clicking the flints together.
  
  How we used to hate those hunters.
  
  One squats in a cave-mouth
  and makes an axe, one in a dune shapes bolt-heads.
  
  "
  They have all (and we too, old king) been dead for thousands of
  years.
  
  I see in the north a red-haired woman
  Meeting her lover by Shane O'Neill's cairn, her peasant husband
  is drunk at home, she drifts up the hill
  In the sleeve of twilight.
  
  "Mary Byrnes is that you?
  
  " "Ye may
  kiss a hure but not name her.
  
  Ah, lad, come down.
  
  When I was a wee maid I used to be loving Jesus,
  All helpless and bleeding on the big cross.
  
  I'd never have married
  my drunkard only the cart ran over him.
  
  He lay helpless and bleeding in the black lane.
  
  Och, laddie, not
  here now.
  
  Carry me up to the cairn: a man lies bloodily under the sharp
  black stones, I love that man.
  
  "
  Mary Byrnes, when her lover has done and finished, before he
  stands up
  To button his clothes together, runs a knife in his throat.
  
  "Oh
  Shane O'Neill it's you I was loving,
  Never one else.
  
  You helpless and bleeding under the stones.
  
  Do ye weary of stretching quiet the four long centuries?
  
  Take
  this lad's blood to hearten you, it drops through the stones.
  
  Drips, drops in the stones.
  
  Drink, Shane; drink, dear: who cares if a hure is hanged?
  
  We kill
  each other in Ireland to pleasure the dead.
  
  "
  Great upright stones higher than the height of a man are our walls,
  Huge overlapping stones are the summer clouds in our sky.
  
  The hill of boulders is heaped over all.
  
  Each hundred years
  One of the enormous stones will move an inch in the dark.
  
  Each double century one of the oaks on the crown of the mound
  Above us breaks in a wind, an oak or an ash grows.
  
  "I see in the south Cloyne round tower burning: the Christians
  have built a spire, the thieves from the sea have burnt it,
  The happy flame streams roaring up the stone tube and breaks
  from the four windows below the stone roof
  Like four bright banners.
  
  The holy men scream in their praying, the golden reliquaries are
  melted, the bell falls clanging.
  
  "
  They have all (and we too, old king) been dead for a thousand
  years.
  
  I see on the island mountain Achill,
  In the west where wave after wave of the beaten tribes ran up
  and starved, an old woman, her head
  Covered with a shawl, sits on Slieve Mor.
  
  Two thin sharp tears
  like knives in the yellow grooves of her face,
  "My cow has died," she says, "and my son forgets me.
  
  " She
  crouches and starves, in the quivering Atlantic wind,
  Among the great skulls of quartz on the Achill mountain.
  
  What do you watch, old king, from the cave?
  
  "A cause of mighty
  laughter in the mound on the hill at Dundalk.
  
  They piled the earth on the blood of one of their spitfire princes,
  their bold watchdog of the Ulster border.
  
  After two handfuls of centuries
  One Bruce, a younger drinker of battles, bloodily ceasing to be
  king of Ireland was buried above him.
  
  Now a rich merchant has built his house on the mound's head,
  a living man.
  
  The old capon perches there trembling,
  The young men of Ireland are passionate again, it is bad for
  a man of peace to have built on the hill of battles,
  Oh his dear skin, Oh the papers of his wealth.
  
  Cuchulain looks up at Bruce and Bruce at the sweating merchant.
  
  By God if we dead that watch the living
  Could open our mouths, the earth would be split with laughter.
  
  "*
  I hear like a hum in the ground the Boyne running through the aging
  Fields forever, and one of our great blue spiral-cut stones
  Settle in the dark a hair's breadth under the burden of the hill.
  
  "We hear from cairn to cromlech all over Ireland the dead
  Whisper and conspire, and whinnies of laughter tinkle in the raths.
  
  The living dream but the dead are awake.
  
  "
  High in Donegal, in the bitter waste north, where miles on miles
  of black heather dwindle to the Bloody Foreland,
  Walks an old priest, near crazy with solitude and his peasants
  like cattle, he has wrestled with his mental Satan
  Half his lifetime, and endured and triumphed.
  
  He feels the reward
  suddenly await him, the churchyard wall
  Looks light and faint, the slabs and mounds by the entrance.
  
  In
  the midst of mass the crucified image trembles
  Above the altar, and favorably smiles.
  
  Then Father O'Donnel
  Gabbles the Latin faster to an end and turns himself once more
  and says to the people, "Go home now.
  
  Missa est.
  
  " In the empty church he screams and spits on the Christ,
  He strikes it with his hand.
  
  Well done, old priest.
  
  "Is the man on
  the cross his God, why does he strike his God?
  
  "
  Because the tortured torturer is too long dying; because the strain
  in the wounded minds of men
  Leaves them no peace; but here where life is worn out men should
  have peace.
  
  He desires nothing but unconsciousness,
  To slip in the black bottomless lake and be still.
  
  Time for us also,
  Old king, although no strain so many thousands of years has
  wounded our minds, time to have done
  With vision, as in the world's youth with desire and deed.
  
  To lie
  in the dark in the hill until the stones crumble,
  And the earth and the stars suck into nothing, the wheel slopes
  and returns, the beautiful burden is renewed.
  
  For probably all the same things will be born and be beautiful
  again, but blessed is the night that has no glowworm.

• Inscription For A Gravestone Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:
  That is to say,
  Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,
  But not as a man
  Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete
  Stripping for the race.
  
  The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer
  Of certain fictions
  Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain
  And expand with pleasure;
  Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:
  That's gone, it is true;
  (I never miss it; if the universe does,
  How easily replaced!)
  But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.
  
  I admired the beauty
  While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.
  
  I wander in the air,
  Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;
  Touch you and Asia
  At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises
  And the glow of this grass.
  
  I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth
  For a love-token.

• Intellectuals Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Is it so hard for men to stand by themselves,
  They must hang on Marx or Christ, or mere Progress?
  
  Clearly it is hard.
  
  But these ought to be leaders .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Sheep leading sheep, "The fold, the fold.
  
  Night comes, and the wolves of doubt.
  
  " Clearly it is hard.
  
  Yourself, if you had not encountered and loved
  Our unkindly all but inhuman God,
  Who is very beautiful and too secure to want worshippers,
  And includes indeed the sheep with the wolves,
  You too might have been looking about for a church.
  
  He includes the flaming stars and pitiable flesh,
  And what we call things and what we call nothing.
  
  He is very beautiful.
  
  But when these lonely have travelled
  Through long thoughts to redeeming despair,
  They are tired and cover their eyes; they flock into fold.

• Iona: The Graves Of The Kings Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I wish not to lie here.
  
  There's hardly a plot of earth not blessed for burial, but here
  One might dream badly.
  
  In beautiful seas a beautiful
  And sainted island, but the dark earth so shallow on the rock
  Gorged with bad meat.
  
  Kings buried in the lee of the saint,
  Kings of fierce Norway, blood-boltered Scotland, bitterly dreaming
  Treacherous Ireland.
  
  Imagine what delusions of grandeur,
  What suspicion-agonized eyes, what jellies of arrogance and terror
  This earth has absorbed.

• Joy Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Though joy is better than sorrow joy is not great;
  Peace is great, strength is great.
  
  Not for joy the stars burn, not for joy the vulture
  Spreads her gray sails on the air
  Over the mountain; not for joy the worn mountain
  Stands, while years like water
  Trench his long sides.
  
  "I am neither mountain nor bird
  Nor star; and I seek joy.
  
  "
  The weakness of your breed: yet at length quietness
  Will cover those wistful eyes.

• July Fourth By The Ocean Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The continent's a tamed ox, with all its mountains,
  Powerful and servile; here is for plowland, here is
  for park and playground, this helpless
  Cataract for power; it lies behind us at heel
  All docile between this ocean and the other.
  
  If
  flood troubles the lowlands, or earthquake
  Cracks walls, it is only a slave's blunder or the
  natural
  Shudder of a new made slave.
  
  Therefore we happy
  masters about the solstice
  Light bonfires on the shore and celebrate our power.
  
  The bay's necklaced with fire, the bombs make crystal
  fountains in the air, the rockets
  Shower swan's-neck over the night water….
  
  I
  imagined
  The stars drew apart a little as if from troublesome
  children, coldly compassionate;
  But the ocean neither seemed astonished nor in awe:
  If this had been the little sea that Xerxes whipped,
  how it would have feared us.

• Let Them Alone Read Poem Log in to favourite

  If God has been good enough to give you a poet
  Then listen to him.
  
  But for God's sake let him alone until he is dead;
  no prizes, no ceremony,
  They kill the man.
  
  A poet is one who listens
  To nature and his own heart; and if the noise of the world grows up
  around him, and if he is tough enough,
  He can shake off his enemies, but not his friends.
  
  That is what withered Wordsworth and muffled Tennyson, and would have
  killed Keats; that is what makes
  Hemingway play the fool and Faulkner forget his art.

• Life From The Lifeless Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Spirits and illusions have died,
  The naked mind lives
  In the beauty of inanimate things.
  
  Flowers wither, grass fades, trees wilt,
  The forest is burnt;
  The rock is not burnt.
  
  The deer starve, the winter birds
  Die on their twigs and lie
  In the blue dawns in the snow.
  
  Men suffer want and become
  Curiously ignoble; as prosperity
  Made them curiously vile.
  
  But look how noble the world is,
  The lonely-flowing waters, the secret-
  Keeping stones, the flowing sky.

• Love The Wild Swan Read Poem Log in to favourite

  "I hate my verses, every line, every word.
  
  Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
  One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
  That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
  
  Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
  One color, one glinting
  Hash, of the splendor of things.
  
  Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
  The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.
  
  "
  —This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
  
  Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
  Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
  
  Does it matter whether you hate your .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  self?
  
  At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
  Hear the music, the thunder of the wings.
  
  Love the wild swan.

• Love-Children Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The trail’s high up on the ridge, no one goes down
  But the east wind and the falling water the concave slope without a name to the little bay
  That has no name either.
  
  The fish-hawk plunges
  Beyond the long rocks, rises with streaming silver; the eagle strikes down from the ridge and robs the fish-hawk;
  The stunted redwoods neither grow nor grow old
  Up the steep slope, remembering winter and the sea-wind; the ferns are maiden green by the falling water;
  The seas whiten on the reefs; nothing has changed
  For a thousand years, ten thousand.
  
  It is not a thousand, it is only seventy, since man and woman came down
  The untrampled slope, forcing a trail through lupine
  And mountain laurel; they built a hut against the streamside; the coast cannot remember their names.
  
  They had light eyes and white skins, and nobody knew
  What they fled, why they came.
  
  They had children in this place; loved while they clung to the breast but later
  Naked, untaught, uncared for, as wild as foxes,
  A boy and a girl; the coast remembers they would squat beside a squirrel’s earth until the furred thing
  Crept out, then what the small hands caught the teeth
  Would tear living.
  
  What implacable flame of passion I wonder left its children forgotten
  To eat vermin and the raw mussels of the rock?
  
  Love at the height is a bad hearth-fire, a wolf in the house to keep the children.
  
  I imagine languors,
  Sick loathing, miserable renewals, blind insolence
  In the eye of the noon sun.
  
  They’d stripped to bathe, desire on the salted beach between the skerries
  Came bronze-clawed like a hawk; the children to see
  Was the deep pearl, the last abandonment.
  
  They lived twelve years in the hut beside the stream, and the children
  Died, and the hut is fallen and vanished, the paths
  Filled with thicket and vanished utterly.
  
  Nothing remains.
  
  Certainly a flame burned in this place;
  Its lamps wandered away, no one knows whither.
  
  The flaming oil-drops fell and burned out.
  
  No one imagines that ghosts move here, at noon or at midnight.
  
  I’m never sorry to think that here’s a planet
  Will go on like this glen, perfectly whole and content, after mankind is scummed from the kettle.
  
  No ghost will walk under the latter starlight.
  
  The little phials of desire have all been emptied and broken.
  
  Here the ocean echoes, the stream’s like bird-song;
  The stunted redwoods neither grow nor grow old
  Up the steep slope, remembering winter and the sea-wind; the ferns are maiden green by the falling water;
  The seas whiten on the reefs; the fish-hawk plunges
  Beyond the long rocks, rises with streaming silver; the eagle strikes down from the ridge and robs the fish-hawk.

• Margrave Read Poem Log in to favourite

  On the small marble-paved platform
  On the turret on the head of the tower,
  Watching the night deepen.
  
  I feel the rock-edge of the continent
  Reel eastward with me below the broad stars.
  
  I lean on the broad worn stones of the parapet top
  And the stones and my hands that touch them reel eastward.
  
  The inland mountains go down and new lights
  Glow over the sinking east rim of the earth.
  
  The dark ocean comes up,
  And reddens the western stars with its fog-breath
  And hides them with its mounded darkness.
  
  The earth was the world and man was its measure, but our minds
  have looked
  Through the little mock-dome of heaven the telescope-slotted
  observatory eyeball, there space and multitude came in
  And the earth is a particle of dust by a sand-grain sun, lost in a
  nameless cove of the shores of a continent.
  
  Galaxy on galaxy, innumerable swirls of innumerable stars, endured
  as it were forever and humanity
  Came into being, its two or three million years are a moment, in
  a moment it will certainly cease out from being
  And galaxy on galaxy endure after that as it were forever .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But man is conscious,
  He brings the world to focus in a feeling brain,
  In a net of nerves catches the splendor of things,
  Breaks the somnambulism of nature .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  His distinction perhaps,
  Hardly his advantage.
  
  To slaver for contemptible pleasures
  And scream with pain, are hardly an advantage.
  
  Consciousness?
  
  The learned astronomer
  Analyzing the light of most remote star-swirls
  Has found them-or a trick of distance deludes his prism-
  All at incredible speeds fleeing outward from ours.
  
  I thought, no doubt they are fleeing the contagion
  Of consciousness that infects this corner of space.
  
  For often I have heard the hard rocks I handled
  Groan, because lichen and time and water dissolve them,
  And they have to travel down the strange falling scale
  Of soil and plants and the flesh of beasts to become
  The bodies of men; they murmur at their fate
  In the hollows of windless nights, they'd rather be anything
  Than human flesh played on by pain and joy,
  They pray for annihilation sooner, but annihilation's
  Not in the book yet.
  
  So, I thought, the rumor
  Of human consciousness has gone abroad in the world,
  The sane uninfected far-outer universes
  Flee it in a panic of escape, as men flee the plague
  Taking a city: for look at the fruits of consciousness:
  As in young Walter Margrave when he'd been sentenced for
  murder: he was thinking when they brought him back
  To the cell in jail,
  "I've only a moment to arrange my thoughts,
  I must think quickly, I must think clearly,
  And settle the world in my mind before I kick off," but to feel
  the curious eyes of his fellow-prisoners
  And the wry-mouthed guard's and so forth torment him through
  the steel bars put his mind in a stupor, he could only
  Sit frowning, ostentatiously unafraid.
  
  "But I can control my
  mind, their eyes can't touch my will.
  
  One against all.
  
  What use is will at this end of everything?
  
  A
  kind of nausea is the chief feeling .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  In my stomach and throat .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  but in my head pride: I fought
  a good fight and they can't break me; alone, unbroken,
  Against a hundred and twenty-three million people.
  
  They are
  going to kill the best brain perhaps in the world,
  That might have made such discoveries in science
  As would set the world centuries ahead, for I had the mind and
  the power.
  
  Boo, it's their loss.
  
  Blind fools,
  Killing their best.
  
  " When his mind forgot the eyes it made rapid
  capricious pictures instead of words,
  But not of the medical school and the laboratories, its late intense
  interest; not at all of his crime; glimpses
  Of the coast-range at home; the V of a westward canyon with
  the vibrating
  Blue line of the ocean strung sharp across it; that domed hill up
  the valley, two cows like specks on the summit
  And a beautiful-colored jungle of poison-oak at the foot; his
  sister half naked washing her hair,
  "My dirty sister," whose example and her lovers had kept him
  chaste by revulsion; the reed-grown mouth of the river
  And the sand-bar against the stinging splendor of the sea .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and anguish behind all the pictures
  (He began to consider his own mind again) "like a wall they
  hang on.
  
  " Hang.
  
  The anguish came forward, an actual
  Knife between two heartbeats, the organ stopped and then raced.
  
  He experimented awhile with his heart,
  Making in his mind a picture of a man hanged, pretending to
  himself it was to happen next moment,
  Trying to observe whether the beat suspended "suspended," he
  thought in systole or in diastole.
  
  The effect soon failed; the anguish remained.
  
  "Ah my slack
  lawyer, damn him, let slip chance after chance.
  
  Scared traitor.
  
  " Then broken pictures of the scenes in court, the
  jury, the judge, the idlers, and not one face
  But bleak with hatred.
  
  "But I met their eyes, one against all.
  
  "
  Suddenly his mind became incapable
  Of making pictures or words, but still wildly active, striking in
  all directions like a snake in a fire,
  Finding nothing but the fiery element of its own anguish.
  
  He got
  up and felt the guard's eyes and sat down,
  Turned side-face, resting his chin on his fist, frowning and
  trembling.
  
  He saw clearly in his mind the little
  Adrenal glands perched on the red-brown kidneys, as if all his
  doomed tissues became transparent,
  Pouring in these passions their violent secretion
  Into his blood-stream, raising the tension unbearably.
  
  And the
  thyroids; tension, tension.
  
  A long course of that
  Should work grave changes.
  
  "If they tortured a man like a laboratory
  dog for discovery: there'd be value gained: but by
  process
  Of law for vengeance, because his glands and his brain have
  made him act in another than common manner:
  You incredible breed of asses!" He smiled self-consciously in
  open scorn of the people, the guard at the door
  To observe that smile "my God, do I care about the turnkey's
  opinion?
  
  "suddenly his mind again
  Was lashing like a burnt snake.
  
  Then it was torpid for a while.
  
  This continued for months.
  
  His father had come to visit him, he saw the ruinous white-haired head
  Through two steel wickets under the bluish electric light that
  seemed to peel the skin from the face.
  
  Walter said cheerfully too loudly, "Hullo.
  
  You look like a skull.
  
  "
  The shaven sunk jaws in answer chewed
  Inaudible words.
  
  Walter with an edge of pleasure thought "Once
  he was stronger than I! I used to admire
  This poor old man's strength when I was a child," and said "Buck
  up, old fellow, it will soon be over.
  
  Here's nothing
  To cry for.
  
  Do you think I'm afraid to die?
  
  It's good people that
  fear death, people with the soft streak
  Of goodness in them fear death: but I, you know, am a monster,
  don't you read the papers?
  
  Caught at last:
  I fought a hundred and twenty-three million people.
  
  How's
  Hazel?
  
  How's the farm?
  
  I could get out of this scrape
  By playing dementia, but I refuse to, there's not an alienist living
  Could catch me out.
  
  I'm the king of Spain dying for the world.
  
  I've been persecuted since I was born
  By a secret sect, they stuck pins into me
  And fed me regular doses of poison for a certain reason.
  
  Why
  do you pretend that you're my father?
  
  God is.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Believe me, I could get by with it.
  
  But I refuse.
  
  "
  Old Margrave looked timidly at the two guards
  listening, and drew his brown tremulous hand
  Across his eyes below the white hair.
  
  "I thought of going to try
  to see the governor, Walter.
  
  "
  "That's it!" "Don't hope for anything, Walter, they tell me that
  there's no hope.
  
  They say that I shan't even
  Be allowed to see him.
  
  " "By God," the young man said trembling,
  "you can if you want to.
  
  Never believe that lawyer.
  
  If I’d had Dorking: but you couldn't afford him.
  
  Poor men have
  no right to breed sons.
  
  I'd not be here
  If you'd had money to put me through college.
  
  Tell the governor
  I know he won't pardon, but he can commute the sentence to
  life imprisonment.
  
  Then I can read and study,
  I can help the penitentiary doctor, I can do something to help
  humanity.
  
  Tell him it's madness
  To throw such a brain as mine into the garbage.
  
  Don't deny my
  guilt but tell him my reasons.
  
  I kidnapped the little girl to get money to finish my medical
  education.
  
  What's one child's life
  Against a career like mine that might have saved
  Thousands of children?
  
  Say I'd isolated the organism of infantile
  paralysis: I'd have done more:
  But that alone would save thousands of children.
  
  I was merciful;
  she died quietly; tell him that.
  
  It was only pithing a little white frog.
  
  Don't you think you can make him understand?
  
  I'm not a criminal:
  I judge differently from others.
  
  I wasn't
  Afraid to think for myself.
  
  All I did
  Was for money for my education, to help humanity.
  
  And tell
  him if I've done wrong what's wrong?
  
  I've paid for it
  With frightful suffering: the more developed the brain the greater
  the agony.
  
  He won't admit that.
  
  Oh God,
  These brains the size of a pea! To be juried
  And strangled by a hundred and twenty-three million peas.
  
  Go
  down on your knees to him.
  
  You owe me that: you'd no right
  To breed, you're poor.
  
  But you itched for a woman, you had to fetch me out of the
  happy hill of not-being.
  
  Pfah, to hug a woman
  And make this I.
  
  That's the evil in the world, that letter.
  
  I-I-
  Tell the governor
  That I'm not afraid of dying, that I laugh at death.
  
  No, no, we'll
  laugh in private.
  
  Tell him I'm crazy.
  
  I've come to that: after being the only sane mind among a hundred
  and twenty-three million peas.
  
  Anything, anything .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  He had let his nerves go wild on purpose,
  to edge on the old man to action, now at last
  Escaping utterly out of control they stumbled into a bog of thick
  sobs.
  
  The guards pulled him up
  And walked him away as if he were half insensible.
  
  He was not
  insensible, but more acutely aware
  Than ever in his life before of all that touched him, and of shame
  and anguish.
  
  You would be wise, you far stars,
  To flee with the speed of light this infection.
  
  For here the good sane invulnerable material
  And nature of things more and more grows alive and cries.
  
  The rock and water grow human, the bitter weed
  Of consciousness catches the sun, it clings to the near stars,
  Even the nearer portion of the universal God
  Seems to become conscious, yearns and rejoices
  And suffers: I believe this hurt will be healed
  Some age of time after mankind has died,
  Then the sun will say "What ailed me a moment?
  
  " and resume
  The old soulless triumph, and the iron and stone earth
  With confident inorganic glory obliterate
  Her ruins and fossils, like that incredible unfading red rose
  Of desert in Arizona glowing life to scorn,
  And grind the chalky emptied seed-shells of consciousness
  The bare skulls of the dead to powder; after some million
  Courses around the sun her sadness may pass:
  But why should you worlds of the virgin distance
  Endure to survive what it were better to escape?
  
  I also am not innocent
  Of contagion, but have spread my spirit on the deep world.
  
  I have gotten sons and sent the fire wider.
  
  I have planted trees, they also feel while they live.
  
  I have humanized the ancient sea-sculptured cliff
  And the ocean's wreckage of rock
  Into a house and a tower,
  Hastening the sure decay of granite with my hammer,
  Its hard dust will make soft flesh;
  And have widened in my idleness
  The disastrous personality of life with poems,
  That are pleasant enough in the breeding but go bitterly at last
  To envy oblivion and the early deaths of nobler
  Verse, and much nobler flesh;
  And I have projected my spirit
  Behind the superb sufficient forehead of nature
  To gift the inhuman God with this rankling consciousness.
  
  But who is our judge?
  
  It is likely the enormous
  Beauty of the world requires for completion our ghostly increment,
  It has to dream, and dream badly, a moment of its night.
  
  On the little stone-belted platform
  On the turret on the head of the tower,
  Between the stars and the earth,
  And the ocean and the continent.
  
  One ship's light shines and eclipses
  Very far out, behind the high waves on the hill of water.
  
  In the east under the Hyades and rising Orion
  Are many cities and multitudes of people,
  But westward a long way they are few enough.
  
  It is fortunate to look westward as to look upward.
  
  In the south the dark river-mouth pool mirrors a star
  That stands over Margrave's farmhouse.
  
  The old man has lost it,
  he isn't there any more.
  
  He went down to the river-mouth
  Last December, when recent rains had opened the stream and the
  salmon were running.
  
  Fishermen very solemnly
  Stood all along the low sand like herons, and sea-lions offshore
  in the rolling waves with deep wet voices
  Coughed at each other; the sea air is hoarse with their voices that
  time of year.
  
  Margrave had rambled since noon
  Among the little folds of the seaward field that he had forgotten
  to plow and was trying to sell
  Though he used to love it, but everything was lost now.
  
  He lay
  awhile on his face in the rotting stubble and random
  Unsown green blades, then he got up and drifted over the ridge
  to the river-mouth sands, unaimed,
  Pale and gap-eyed, as the day moon a clear morning, opposite the
  sun.
  
  He noticed with surprise the many
  Fishermen like herons in the shallows and along the sands; and
  then that his girl Hazel was with him: who'd feared
  What he might do to himself and had come to watch him when
  he lay face down in the field.
  
  "I know what they're doing,"
  He said slyly, "Hazel, they're fishing! I guess they don't know,"
  He whispered, "about our trouble.
  
  Oh no, don't tell them.
  
  " She
  said, "Don't go down, father, your face would tell them.
  
  Sit here on the edge of grass, watch the brown river meet the
  blue sea.
  
  Do look: that boy's caught something.
  
  How the line cuts the water and the small wheel sings.
  
  " "If I'd
  been rich,"
  Old Margrave answered, "they'd have fixed the hook for .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Walter .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  with some other bait.
  
  It sticks in my mind that
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Walter
  Blames me too much.
  
  " "Look," Hazel said, "he's landing it now.
  
  Oh, it's a big one.
  
  " "I dreamed about fishing,
  Some time ago," he answered, "but we were the fish.
  
  I saw the
  people all running reaching for prizes
  That dangled on long lines from the sky.
  
  A lovely girl or a sack
  of money or a case of whiskey,
  Or fake things like reputation, hackle-feathers and a hook.
  
  A man
  would reach up and grab and the line
  Jerked, then you knew by his face that the hook was in him,
  wherever he went.
  
  Often they're played for half
  A lifetime before they're landed: others, like .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  my son .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  pulled up short.
  
  Oh, Oh,
  It's not a dream.
  
  " He said gently, "He wanted money for his
  education, but you poor girl
  Wanted boy friends, now you've got a round belly.
  
  That's the
  hook.
  
  I wanted children and got
  Walter and you.
  
  Hm?
  
  Hooked twice is too much.
  
  Let's walk.
  
  "
  "Not that way: let's go up home, daddy.
  
  It makes you unhappy to see them fishing.
  
  " "No," he answered,
  "nothing can.
  
  I have it in my pocket.
  
  " She walked behind him,
  Hiding herself, ashamed of her visible pregnancy and her brother's
  fate; but when the old man stumbled
  And wavered on the slope she went beside him to support him,
  her right hand under his elbow, and wreathed his body
  With the other arm.
  
  The clear brown river ran eagerly through
  the sand-hill, undercutting its banks,
  That slid in masses; tall waves walked very slowly up stream from
  the sea, and stood
  Stationary in the throat of the channel before they dissolved.
  
  The
  rock the children call Red-cap stood
  High and naked among the fishermen, the orange lichen on its
  head.
  
  At the sea-end of the sand
  Two boys and a man had rifles instead of rods, they meant to
  punish the salmon-devouring sea-lions
  Because the fish were fewer than last year; whenever a sleek
  brown head with the big questioning eyes
  Broke sea they fired.
  
  Margrave had heard the shots but taken no
  notice, but when he walked by the stream
  He saw a swimmer look up from the water and its round dark eye
  Suddenly burst red blood before it went down.
  
  He cried out and
  twisted himself from Hazel's hand
  And ran like a squirrel along the stream-bank.
  
  "I'll not allow it!"
  He snatched at a rifle.
  
  "Why should my lad
  Be hanged for killing and all you others go free?
  
  " He wrestled
  feebly to gain the rifle, the sand-bank
  Slid under his feet, he slipped and lay face down in the running
  stream and was hauled astrand.
  
  Then Hazel
  Came running heavily, and when he was able to walk she led him
  away.
  
  The sea-beast, blinded but a painful
  Vain gleam, starved long before it could die; old Margrave still
  lives.
  
  Death's like a little gay child that runs
  The world around with the keys of salvation in his foolish fingers,
  lends them at random where they're not wanted,
  But often withholds them where most required.
  
  Margrave's son
  at this time
  Had only four days to wait, but death now appeared so dreadful
  to him that to speak of his thoughts and the abject
  Horror, would be to insult humanity more than it deserves.
  
  At
  last the jerked hemp snapped the neck sideways
  And bruised the cable of nerves that threads the bone rings; the
  intolerably strained consciousness in a moment changed.
  
  It was strangely cut in two parts at the noose, the head's
  Consciousness from the body's; both were set free and flamed;
  the head's with flashing paradisal light
  Like the wild birth of a star, but crying in bewilderment and
  suddenly extinguished; the body's with a sharp emotion
  Of satisfied love, a wave of hard warmth and joy, that ebbed cold
  on darkness.
  
  After a time of darkness
  The dreams that follow upon death came and subsided, like
  fibrillar twitchings
  Of the nerves unorganizing themselves; and some of the small
  dreams were delightful and some, slight miseries,
  But nothing intense; then consciousness wandered home from the
  cell to the molecule, was utterly dissolved and changed;
  Peace was the end of the play, so far as concerns humanity.
  
  Oh
  beautiful capricious little savior,
  Death, the gay child with the gipsy eyes, to avoid you for a time
  I think is virtuous, to fear you is insane.
  
  On the little stone-girdled platform
  Over the earth and the ocean
  I seem to have stood a long time and watched the stars pass.
  
  They also shall perish I believe.
  
  Here to-day, gone to-morrow, desperate wee galaxies
  Scattering themselves and shining their substance away
  Like a passionate thought.
  
  It is very well ordered.

• Meditation On Saviors Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element
  and smelt it like water,
  Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a
  little troublesome, a little terrible.
  
  I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death
  nor in a walled garden,
  In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that
  easily lock the world out of doors.
  
  Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet
  granite sea-fang it is easy to praise
  Life and water and the shining stones: but whose cattle are the
  herds of the people that one should love them?
  
  If they were yours, then you might take a cattle-breeder's
  delight in the herds of the future.
  
  Not yours.
  
  Where the power ends let love, before it sours to jealousy.
  
  Leave the joys of government to Caesar.
  
  Who is born when the world wanes, when the brave soul of the
  world falls on decay in the flesh increasing
  Comes one with a great level mind, sufficient vision, sufficient
  blindness, and clemency for love.
  
  This is the breath of rottenness I smelt; from the world
  waiting, stalled between storms, decaying a little,
  Bitterly afraid to be hurt, but knowing it cannot draw the
  savior Caesar but out of the blood-bath.
  
  The apes of Christ lift up their hands to praise love: but
  wisdom without love is the present savior,
  Power without hatred, mind like a many-bladed machine subduing
  the world with deep indifference.
  
  The apes of Christ itch for a sickness they have never known;
  words and the little envies will hardly
  Measure against that blinding fire behind the tragic eyes they
  have never dared to confront.
  
  II
  Point Lobos lies over the hollowed water like a humped whale
  swimming to shoal; Point Lobos
  Was wounded with that fire; the hills at Point Sur endured it;
  the palace at Thebes; the hill Calvary.
  
  Out of incestuous love power and then ruin.
  
  A man forcing the
  imaginations of men,
  Possessing with love and power the people: a man defiling his
  own household with impious desire.
  
  King Oedipus reeling blinded from the palace doorway, red tears
  pouring from the torn pits
  Under the forehead; and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill
  in the earthquake, against the eclipse
  Frightfully uplifted for having turned inward to love the
  people: -that root was so sweet O dreadful agonist?
  
  -
  I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to
  its expiation; I heard the same cry.
  
  A bad mountain to build your world on.
  
  Am I another keeper of
  the people, that on my own shore,
  On the gray rock, by the grooved mass of the ocean, the
  sicknesses I left behind me concern me?
  
  Here where the surf has come incredible ways out of the splendid
  west, over the deeps
  Light nor life sounds forever; here where enormous sundowns
  flower and burn through color to quietness;
  Then the ecstasy of the stars is present?
  
  As for the people, I
  have found my rock, let them find theirs.
  
  Let them lie down at Caesar's feet and be saved; and he in his
  time reap their daggers of gratitude.
  
  III
  Yet I am the one made pledges against the refuge contempt, that
  easily locks the world out of doors.
  
  This people as much as the sea-granite is part of the God from
  whom I desire not to be fugitive.
  
  I see them: they are always crying.
  
  The shored Pacific makes
  perpetual music, and the stone mountains
  Their music of silence, the stars blow long pipings of light:
  the people are always crying in their hearts.
  
  One need not pity; certainly one must not love.
  
  But who has seen
  peace, if he should tell them where peace
  Lives in the world…they would be powerless to understand; and
  he is not willing to be reinvolved.
  
  IV
  How should one caught in the stone of his own person dare tell
  the people anything but relative to that?
  
  But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once,
  of man and woman, of civilized
  And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of
  living and dead, of human and not
  Human, and dimly all the human future: -what should persuade him
  to speak?
  
  And what could his words change?
  
  The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed.
  
  But
  the man's words would be fixed also,
  Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same
  present compulsion in the iron consistency.
  
  And nobody sees good or evil but out of a brain a hundred
  centuries quieted, some desert
  Prophet's, a man humped like a camel, gone mad between the mud-
  walled village and the mountain sepulchres.
  
  V
  Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the
  open farms, and the people are fed.
  
  They import and they consume reality.
  
  Before sunrise a hawk in
  the desert made them their thoughts.
  
  VI
  Here is an anxious people, rank with suppressed
  bloodthirstiness.
  
  Among the mild and unwarlike
  Gautama needed but live greatly and be heard, Confucius needed
  but live greatly and be heard:
  This people has not outgrown blood-sacrifice, one must writhe on
  the high cross to catch at their memories;
  The price is known.
  
  I have quieted love; for love of the people
  I would not do it.
  
  For power I would do it.
  
  —But that stands against reason: what is power to a dead man,
  dead under torture?
  
  —What is power to a man
  Living, after the flesh is content?
  
  Reason is never a root,
  neither of act nor desire.
  
  For power living I would never do it; they're not delightful to
  touch, one wants to be separate.
  
  For power
  After the nerves are put away underground, to lighten the
  abstract unborn children toward peace…
  A man might have paid anguish indeed.
  
  Except he had found the
  standing sea-rock that even this last
  Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
  that quiets the desire even of praising it.
  
  VII
  Yet look: are they not pitiable?
  
  No: if they lived forever they
  would be pitiable:
  But a huge gift reserved quite overwhelms them at the end; they
  are able then to be still and not cry.
  
  And having touched a little of the beauty and seen a little of
  the beauty of things, magically grow
  Across the funeral fire or the hidden stench of burial
  themselves into the beauty they admired,
  Themselves into the God, themselves into the sacred steep
  unconsciousness they used to mimic
  Asleep between lamp's death and dawn, while the last drunkard
  stumbled homeward down the dark street.
  
  They are not to be pitied but very fortunate; they need no
  savior, salvation comes and takes them by force,
  It gathers them into the great kingdoms of dust and stone, the
  blown storms, the stream's-end ocean.
  
  With this advantage over their granite grave-marks, of having
  realized the petulant human consciousness
  Before, and then the greatness, the peace: drunk from both
  pitchers: these to be pitied?
  
  These not fortunate
  But while he lives let each man make his health in his mind, to
  love the coast opposite humanity
  And so be freed of love, laying it like bread on the waters; it
  is worst turned inward, it is best shot farthest.
  
  Love, the mad wine of good and evil, the saint's and murderer's,
  the mote in the eye that makes its object
  Shine the sun black; the trap in which it is better to catch the
  inhuman God than the hunter's own image.
  
  Anonymous submission.

• Mountain Pines Read Poem Log in to favourite

  In scornful upright loneliness they stand,
  Counting themselves no kin of anything
  Whether of earth or sky.
  
  Their gnarled roots cling
  Like wasted fingers of a clutching hand
  In the grim rock.
  
  A silent spectral band
  They watch the old sky, but hold no communing
  With aught.
  
  Only, when some lone eagle's wing
  Flaps past above their grey and desolate land,
  Or when the wind pants up a rough-hewn glen,
  Bending them down as with an age of thought,
  Or when, ‘mid flying clouds that can not dull
  Her constant light, the moon shines silver, then
  They find a soul, and their dim moan is wrought
  Into a singing sad and beautiful.

• Natural Music Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
  (Winter has given them gold for silver
  To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
  From different throats intone one language.
  
  So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
  Divisions of desire and terror
  To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,
  Those voices also would be found
  Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone
  By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.

• New Mexican Mountain Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I watch the Indians dancing to help the young corn at Taos
  pueblo.
  
  The old men squat in a ring
  And make the song, the young women with fat bare arms, and a
  few shame-faced young men, shuffle the dance.
  
  The lean-muscled young men are naked to the narrow loins,
  their breasts and backs daubed with white clay,
  Two eagle-feathers plume the black heads.
  
  They dance with
  reluctance, they are growing civilized; the old men persuade them.
  
  Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed;
  the beating heart, the simplest of rhythms,
  It thinks the world has not changed at all; it is only a dreamer,
  a brainless heart, the drum has no eyes.
  
  These tourists have eyes, the hundred watching the dance, white
  Americans, hungrily too, with reverence, not laughter;
  Pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking beauty, religion,
  poetry; pilgrims from the vacuum.
  
  People from cities, anxious to be human again.
  
  Poor show how
  they suck you empty! The Indians are emptied,
  And certainly there was never religion enough, nor beauty nor
  poetry here .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  to fill Americans.
  
  Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed.
  
  Apparently only myself and the strong
  Tribal drum, and the rockhead of Taos mountain, remember
  that civilization is a transient sickness.

• New Year’s Eve Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Staggering homeward between the stream and the trees the unhappy
  drunkard
  Babbles a woeful song and babbles
  The end of the world, the moon's like fired Troy in a flying
  cloud, the storm
  Rises again, the stream's in flood.
  
  The moon's like the sack of Carthage, the Bastile's broken, pedlars
  and empires
  Still deal in luxury, men sleep in prison.
  
  Old Saturn thinks it was better in his grandsire's time but that's
  from the brittle
  Arteries, it neither betters nor worsens.
  
  (Nobody knows my love the falcon.
  
  )
  It has always bristled with phantoms, always factitious, mildly absurd;
  The organism, with no precipitous
  Degeneration, slight imperceptible discounts of sense and faculty,
  Adapts itself to the culture-medium.
  
  (Nobody crawls to the test-tube rim,
  Nobody knows my love the falcon.
  
  )
  The star's on the mountain, the stream snoring in flood; the brain-lit
  drunkard
  Crosses midnight and stammers to bed.
  
  The inhuman nobility of things, the ecstatic beauty, the inveterate
  steadfastness
  Uphold the four posts of the bed.
  
  (Nobody knows my love the falcon.
  
  )

• Night Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The ebb slips from the rock, the sunken
  Tide-rocks lift streaming shoulders
  Out of the slack, the slow west
  Sombering its torch; a ship's light
  Shows faintly, far out,
  Over the weight of the prone ocean
  On the low cloud.
  
  Over the dark mountain, over the dark pinewood,
  Down the long dark valley along the shrunken river,
  Returns the splendor without rays, the shining of shadow,
  Peace-bringer, the matrix of all shining and quieter of shining.
  
  Where the shore widens on the bay she opens dark wings
  And the ocean accepts her glory.
  
  O soul worshipful of her
  You like the ocean have grave depths where she dwells always,
  And the film of waves above that takes the sun takes also
  Her, with more love.
  
  The sun-lovers have a blond favorite,
  A father of lights and noises, wars, weeping and laughter,
  Hot labor, lust and delight and the other blemishes.
  
  Quietness
  Flows from her deeper fountain; and he will die; and she is
  immortal.
  
  Far off from here the slender
  Flocks of the mountain forest
  Move among stems like towers
  Of the old redwoods to the stream,
  No twig crackling; dip shy
  Wild muzzles into the mountain water
  Among the dark ferns.
  
  O passionately at peace you being secure will pardon
  The blasphemies of glowworms, the lamp in my tower, the
  fretfulness
  Of cities, the cressets of the planets, the pride of the stars.
  
  This August night in a rift of cloud Antares reddens,
  The great one, the ancient torch, a lord among lost children,
  The earth's orbit doubled would not girdle his greatness, one fire
  Globed, out of grasp of the mind enormous; but to you O Night
  What?
  
  Not a spark?
  
  What flicker of a spark in the faint far
  glimmer
  Of a lost fire dying in the desert, dim coals of a sand-pit the
  Bedouins
  Wandered from at dawn .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah singing prayer to what gulfs
  tempted
  Suddenly are you more lost?
  
  To us the near-hand mountain
  Be a measure of height, the tide-worn cliff at the sea-gate a
  measure of continuance.
  
  The tide, moving the night's
  Vastness with lonely voices,
  Turns, the deep dark-shining
  Pacific leans on the land,
  Feeling his cold strength
  To the outmost margins: you Night will resume
  The stars in your time.
  
  O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward?
  
  Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus,
  Tire of their flow, they sing one song but they think silence.
  
  The striding winter giant Orion shines, and dreams darkness.
  
  And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on the hill,
  Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding, passionately
  Remaking itself upon its mates, remembers deep inward
  The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg,
  The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory
  Prophesies, prophecy that remembers, the charm of the dark.
  
  And I and my people, we are willing to love the four-score years
  Heartily; but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is for harbor.
  
  Have men's minds changed,
  Or the rock hidden in the deep of the waters of the soul
  Broken the surface?
  
  A few centuries
  Gone by, was none dared not to people
  The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations.
  
  But now, dear is the truth.
  
  Life is grown sweeter and lonelier,
  And death is no evil.

• Night Without Sleep Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The world's as the world is; the nations rearm and prepare to
  change; the age of tyrants returns;
  The greatest civilization that has ever existed builds itself higher
  towers on breaking foundations.
  
  Recurrent episodes; they were determined when the ape's children
  first ran in packs, chipped flint to an edge.
  
  I lie and hear dark rain beat the roof, and the blind wind.
  
  In the morning perhaps
  I shall find strength again
  To value the immense beauty of this time of the world, the flowers
  of decay their pitiful loveliness, the fever-dream
  Tapestries that back the drama and are called the future.
  
  This
  ebb of vitality feels the ignoble and cruel
  Incidents, not the vast abstract order.
  
  I lie and hear dark rain beat
  the roof, and the night-blind wind.
  
  In the Ventana country darkness and rain and the roar of waters
  fill the deep mountain-throats.
  
  The creekside shelf of sand where we lay last August under a slip of stars,
  And firelight played on the leaning gorge-walls, is drowned and
  lost.
  
  The deer of the country huddle on a ridge
  In a close herd under madrone-trees; they tremble when a rockslide
  goes down, they open great darkness-
  Drinking eyes and press closer.
  
  Cataracts of rock
  Rain down the mountain from cliff to cliff and torment the
  stream-bed.
  
  The stream deals with them.
  
  The laurels are wounded,
  Redwoods go down with their earth and lie thwart the gorge.
  
  I
  hear the torrent boulders battering each other,
  I feel the flesh of the mountain move on its bones in the wet
  darkness.
  
  Is this more beautiful
  Than man's disasters?
  
  These wounds will heal in their time; so
  will humanity's.
  
  This is more beautiful .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  at night .
  
  .
  
  .

• No Resurrection Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Friendship, when a friend meant a helping sword,
  Faithfulness, when power and life were its fruits, hatred, when
  the hated
  Held steel at your throat or had killed your children, were more
  than metaphors.
  
  Life and the world were as bright as knives.
  
  But now, if I should recall my ruins
  From the grass-roots and build my body again in the heavy grave,
  Twist myself naked up through the earth like a strong white worm,
  Tip the great stone, gulp the white air,
  And live once more after long ages
  In the change of the world: I should find the old human affections
  hollowed.
  
  Should I need a friend?
  
  No one will really stab me from behind,
  The people in the land of the living walk weaponless.
  
  Should I hate an enemy?
  
  The evil-doers
  Are pitiable now.
  
  Or to whom be faithful?
  
  Of whom seek faith?
  
  Who has eaten of the victor's feast and shared the fugitive silence
  Of beaten men on the mountain: suffer
  Resurrection to join this midge-dance
  Of gutted and multiplied echoes of life in the latter sun?
  
  Dead man, be quiet.
  
  A fool of a merchant, who'd sell good earth
  And grass again to make modern flesh.

• Notes To "Descent To The Dead" Read Poem Log in to favourite

  It seems hardly necessary to stipulate that the elegiac tone of
  these verses reflects the writer's mood, and is not meant for economic
  or political opinion.
  
  Shane O'Neill's cairn and the dateless monument called Ossian's
  Grave stand within a couple of miles of each other on the Antrim coast.
  
  A dolmen is a prehistoric burial-house made of great stones set
  on end, roofed by a slab of stone.
  
  There are many still standing in
  Ireland and England.
  
  Newgrange is one of three great artificial hills, on the Boyne
  west of Drogheda.
  
  Passages and cells were made of megalithic
  stonework, decorated with designs cut in the great stones, and the
  hills were heaped over them.
  
  No one assigns a reasonable date to
  these erections.
  
  Evidently they are burial mounds, like the pyramids.
  
  The Irish round towers are well known, of course, slender, tapering
  spires of stone and lime mortar, of mysterious origin, but
  probably belfries and towers of refuge, built between 600 and
  1200 A.
  
  D.
  
  They are associated with the earliest Christian churches.
  
  Antrim is the northeasternmost county of Ireland, only a few
  sea-miles from Scotland.
  
  lona is the sacred island of the Hebrides.
  
  Avebury is a little Wiltshire village inside a great prehistoric
  stone-circle and fosse.
  
  It was the religious and perhaps the political
  capital of southern England before Stonehenge was built, i.
  
  e.
  
  ,
  before 2000 B.
  
  C.
  
  , probably.
  
  The circle and the remaining stones
  are greater than those at Stonehenge, but the stones were not
  hewn to shape.
  
  Most of them are gone now; broken up to build
  the village.
  
  Dozmare Pool is in Cornwall, a little flat mere in a wide wilderness,
  said to be the water where the sword Excalibur was cast
  away when King Arthur died.
  
  The ridgeways are ancient grass-grown roads on the ridges of the
  hills, used by the pre-Celtic inhabitants of England, when the
  lowlands were impassable swamp and forest.

• Nova Read Poem Log in to favourite

  That Nova was a moderate star like our good sun; it stored no
  doubt a little more than it spent
  Of heat and energy until the increasing tension came to the
  trigger-point
  Of a new chemistry; then what was already flaming found a new
  manner of flaming ten-thousandfold
  More brightly for a brief time; what was a pin-point fleck on a
  sensitive plate at the great telescope's
  Eye-piece now shouts down the steep night to the naked eye,
  a nine-day super-star.
  
  It is likely our moderate
  Father the sun will some time put off his nature for a similar
  glory.
  
  The earth would share it; these tall
  Green trees would become a moment's torches and vanish, the
  oceans would explode into invisible steam,
  The ships and the great whales fall through them like flaming
  meteors into the emptied abysm, the six mile
  Hollows of the Pacific sea-bed might smoke for a moment.
  
  Then
  the earth would be like the pale proud moon,
  Nothing but vitrified sand and rock would be left on earth.
  
  This
  is a probable death-passion
  For the sun's planets; we have no knowledge to assure us it may
  not happen at any moment of time.
  
  Meanwhile the sun shines wisely and warm, trees flutter green
  in the wind, girls take their clothes off
  To bathe in the cold ocean or to hunt love; they stand laughing
  in the white foam, they have beautiful
  Shoulders and thighs, they are beautiful animals, all life is beautiful.
  
  We cannot be sure of life for one moment;
  We can, by force and self-discipline, by many refusals and a few
  assertions, in the teeth of fortune assure ourselves
  Freedom and integrity in life or integrity in death.
  
  And we know
  that the enormous invulnerable beauty of things
  Is the face of God, to live gladly in its presence, and die without
  grief or fear knowing it survives us.

• November Surf Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Some lucky day each November great waves awake and are
  drawn
  Like smoking mountains bright from the west
  And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness: then
  suddenly
  The old granite forgets half a year's filth:
  The orange-peel, eggshells, papers, pieces of clothing, the clots
  Of dung in corners of the rock, and used
  Sheaths that make light love safe in the evenings: all the droppings
  of the summer
  Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy:
  I think this cumbered continent envies its cliff then.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But all
  seasons
  The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,
  Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up the long
  coast
  Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:
  The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more
  numerous,
  The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
  Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains
  The dignity of room, the value of rareness.

• Now Returned Home Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Beyond the narrows of the Inner Hebrides
  We sailed the cold angry sea toward Barra, where Heaval mountain
  Lifts like a mast.
  
  There were few people on the steamer, it was late in the
  year; I noticed most an old shepherd,
  Two wise-eyed dogs wove anxious circles around his feet, and a thin-armed
  girl
  Who cherished what seemed a doll, wrapping it against the sea-wind.
  
  When
  it moved I said to my wife "She'll smother it.
  
  "
  And she to the girl: "Is your baby cold?
  
  You'd better run down out of the
  wind and uncover its face.
  
  "
  She raised the shawl and said "He is two weeks old.
  
  His mother died in
  Glasgow in the hospital
  Where he was born.
  
  She was my sister.
  
  " I looked ahead at the bleak island,
  gray stones, ruined castle,
  A few gaunt houses under the high and comfortless mountain; my wife
  looked at the sickly babe,
  And said "There's a good doctor in Barra?
  
  It will soon be winter.
  
  " "Ah,"
  she answered, "Barra'd be heaven for him,
  The poor wee thing, there's Heaval to break the wind.
  
  We live on a wee
  island yonder away,
  Just the one house.
  
  "
  The steamer moored, and a skiff—what they call a
  curragh, like a canvas canoe
  Equipped with oars—came swiftly along the side.
  
  The dark-haired girl
  climbed down to it, with one arm holding
  That doubtful slip of life to her breast; a tall young man with sea-pale eyes
  and an older man
  Helped her; if a word was spoken I did not hear it.
  
  They stepped a mast
  and hoisted a henna-color
  Bat's wing of sail.
  
  Now, returned home
  After so many thousands of miles of road and ocean, all the hulls sailed in,
  the houses visited,
  I remember that slender skiff with dark henna sail
  Bearing off across the stormy sunset to the distant island
  Most clearly; and have rather forgotten the dragging whirlpools of London,
  The screaming haste of New York.

• Oh, Lovely Rock Read Poem Log in to favourite

  We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek,
  up the east fork.
  
  The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest
  above our heads, maple and redwood,
  Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian
  firs that stare up the cataracts
  Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
  
  We lay on gravel and
  kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
  
  Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling
  darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
  On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay
  down again.
  
  The revived flame
  Lighted my sleeping son's face and his companion's, and the vertical
  face of the great gorge-wall
  Across the stream.
  
  Light leaves overhead danced in the fire's
  breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
  That fascinated my eyes and mind.
  
  Nothing strange; light-gray
  diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
  Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no
  fern nor lichen, pure naked rock .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  as if I were
  Seeing rock for the first time.
  
  As if I were seeing through the
  flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
  And living rock.
  
  Nothing strange .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I cannot
  Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and
  childlike loveliness: this fate going on
  Outside our fates.
  
  It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling
  child.
  
  I shall die, and my boys
  Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies
  of change and discovery; this age will die,
  And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem:
  this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
  That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above:
  and I, many packed centuries ago,
  Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

• On Building With Stone Read Poem Log in to favourite

  To be an ape in little of the mountain-making mother
  Like swarthy Cheops, but my own hands
  For only slaves, is a far sweeter toil than to cut
  Passions in verse for a sick people.
  
  I'd liefer bed one boulder in the house-wall than be the time's
  Archilochus: we name not Homer: who now
  Can even imagine the fabulous dawn when bay-leaves (to a blind
  Beggar) were not bitter in the teeth?

• Original Sin Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The man-brained and man-handed ground-ape, physically
  The most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals
  Up to that time of the world: they had dug a pitfall
  And caught a mammoth, but how could their sticks and stones
  Reach the life in that hide?
  
  They danced around the pit, shrieking
  With ape excitement, flinging sharp flints in vain, and the stench of their bodies
  Stained the white air of dawn; but presently one of them
  Remembered the yellow dancer, wood-eating fire
  That guards the cave-mouth: he ran and fetched him, and others
  Gathered sticks at the wood’s edge; they made a blaze
  And pushed it into the pit, and they fed it high, around the mired sides
  Of their huge prey.
  
  They watched the long hairy trunk
  Waver over the stifle trumpeting pain,
  And they were happy.
  
  Meanwhile the intense color and nobility of sunrise,
  Rose and gold and amber, flowed up the sky.
  
  Wet rocks were shining, a little wind
  Stirred the leaves of the forest and the marsh flag-flowers; the soft valley between the low hills
  Became as beautiful as the sky; while in its midst, hour after hour, the happy hunters
  Roasted their living meat slowly to death.
  
  These are the people.
  
  This is the human dawn.
  
  As for me, I would rather
  Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.
  
  But we are what we are, and we might remember
  Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;
  And not be astonished at any evil, all are deserved;
  And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

• Ossian’s Grave Read Poem Log in to favourite

  PREHISTORIC MONUMENT NEAR CUSHENDALL
  IN ANTRIM
  Steep up in Lubitavish townland stands
  A ring of great stones like fangs, the shafts of the stones
  Grown up with thousands of years of gradual turf,
  The fangs of the stones still biting skyward; and hard
  Against the stone ring, the oblong enclosure
  Of an old grave guarded with erect slabs; gray rocks
  Backed by broken thorn-trees, over the gorge of Glenaan;
  It is called Ossian's Grave.
  
  Ossian rests high then,
  Haughtily alone.
  
  If there were any fame or burial or monument
  For me to envy,
  Warrior and poet they should be yours and yours.
  
  For this is the pure fame, not caged in a poem,
  Fabulous, a glory untroubled with works, a name in the north
  Like a mountain in the mist, like Aura
  Heavy with heather and the dark gray rocks, or Trostan
  Dark purple in the cloud: happier than what the wings
  And imperfections of work hover like vultures
  Above the carcass.
  
  I also make a remembered name;
  And I shall return home to the granite stones
  On my cliff over the greatest ocean
  To be blind ashes under the butts of the stones:
  As you here under the fanged limestone columns
  Are said to lie, over the narrow north straits
  Toward Scotland, and the quick-tempered Moyle.
  
  But written
  reminders
  Will blot for too long a year the bare sunlight
  Above my rock lair, heavy black birds
  Over the field and the blood of the lost battle.
  
  Oh but we lived splendidly
  In the brief light of day
  Who now twist in our graves.
  
  You in the guard of the fanged
  Erect stones; and the man-slayer
  Shane O'Neill dreams yonder at Cushendun
  Crushed under his cairn;
  And Hugh McQuillan under his cairn
  By his lost field in the bog on Aura;
  And I a foreigner, one who has come to the country of the dead
  Before I was called,
  To eat the bitter dust of my ancestors;
  And thousands on tens of thousands in the thronged earth
  Under the rotting freestone tablets
  At the bases of broken round towers;
  And the great Connaught queen on her mountain-summit
  The high cloud hoods, it creeps through the eyes of the cairn,
  We dead have our peculiar pleasures, of not
  Doing, of not feeling, of not being.
  
  Enough has been felt, enough done, Oh and surely
  Enough of humanity has been.
  
  We lie under stones
  Or drift through the endless northern twilights
  And draw over our pale survivors the net of our dream.
  
  All their lives are less
  Substantial than one of our deaths, and they cut turf
  Or stoop in the steep
  Short furrows, or drive the red carts, like weeds waving
  Under the glass of water in a locked bay,
  Which neither the wind nor the wave nor their own will
  Moves; when they seem to awake
  It is only to madden in their dog-days for memories of dreams
  That lost all meaning many centuries ago.
  
  Oh but we lived splendidly
  In the brief light of day,
  You with hounds on the mountain
  And princes in palaces,
  I on the western cliff
  In the rages of the sun:
  Now you lie grandly under your stones
  But I in a peasant's hut
  Eat bread bitter with the dust of dead men;
  The water I draw at the spring has been shed for tears
  Ten thousand times,
  Or wander through the endless northern twilights
  From the rath to the cairn, through fields
  Where every field-stone's been handled
  Ten thousand times,
  In a uterine country, soft
  And wet and worn out, like an old womb
  That I have returned to, being dead.
  
  Oh but we lived splendidly
  Who now twist in our graves.
  
  The mountains are alive;
  Tievebuilleagh lives, Trostan lives,
  Lurigethan lives;
  And Aura, the black-faced sheep in the belled heather;
  And the swan-haunted loughs; but also a few of us dead
  A life as inhuman and cold as those.

• Pelicans Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Four pelicans went over the house,
  Sculled their worn oars over the courtyard: I saw that ungainliness
  Magnifies the idea of strength.
  
  A lifting gale of sea-gulls followed them; slim yachts of the element,
  Natural growths of the sky, no wonder
  Light wings to leave sea; but those grave weights toil, and are powerful,
  And the wings torn with old storms remember
  The cone that the oldest redwood dropped from, the tilting of continents,
  The dinosaur's day, the life of new sea-lines.
  
  The omnisecular spirit keeps the old with the new also.
  
  Nothing at all has suffered erasure.
  
  There is life not of our time.
  
  He calls ungainly bodies
  As beautiful as the grace of horses.
  
  He is weary of nothing; he watches airplanes, he watches pelicans.
  
  Optional

• People And A Heron Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A desert of weed and water-darkened stone under my western
  windows
  The ebb lasted all afternoon,
  And many pieces of humanity, men, women, and children, gathering
  shellfish,
  Swarmed with voices of gulls the sea-breach.
  
  At twilight they went off together, the verge was left vacant, an
  evening heron
  Bent broad wings over the black ebb,
  And left me wondering why a lone bird was dearer to me than
  many people.
  
  Well: rare is dear: but also I suppose
  Well reconciled with the world but not with our own natures
  we grudge to see them
  Reflected on the world for a mirror.

• Phenomena Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Great-enough both accepts and subdues; the great frame takes
  all creatures;
  From the greatness of their element they all take beauty.
  
  Gulls; and the dingy freightship lurching south in the eye of a
  rain-wind;
  The airplane dipping over the hill; hawks hovering
  The white grass of the headland; cormorants roosting upon the
  guano-
  Whitened skerries; pelicans awind; sea-slime
  Shining at night in the wave-stir like drowned men's lanterns;
  smugglers signaling
  A cargo to land; or the old Point Pinos lighthouse
  Lawfully winking over dark water; the flight of the twilight
  herons,
  Lonely wings and a cry; or with motor-vibrations
  That hum in the rock like a new storm-tone of the ocean's to
  turn eyes westward
  The navy's new-bought Zeppelin going by in the twilight,
  Far out seaward; relative only to the evening star and the ocean
  It slides into a cloud over Point Lobos.

• Point Joe Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Point Joe has teeth and has torn ships; it has fierce and solitary
  beauty;
  Walk there all day you shall see nothing that will not make part
  of a poem.
  
  I saw the spars and planks of shipwreck on the rocks, and beyond
  the desolate
  Sea-meadows rose the warped wind-bitten van of the pines, a
  fog-bank vaulted
  Forest and all, the flat sea-meadows at that time of year were
  plated
  Golden with the low flower called footsteps of the spring, millions
  of flowerets,
  Whose light suffused upward into the fog flooded its vault, we
  wandered
  Through a weird country where the light beat up from earthward,
  and was golden.
  
  One other moved there, an old Chinaman gathering seaweed
  from the sea-rocks,
  He brought it in his basket and spread it flat to dry on the edge of
  the meadow.
  
  Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally
  Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always
  present.
  
  Grass that is made each year equals the mountains in her past
  and future;
  Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of.
  
  Man gleaning food between the solemn presences of land and
  ocean,
  On shores where better men have shipwrecked, under fog and
  among flowers,
  Equals the mountains in his past and future; that glow from the
  earth was only
  A trick of nature's, one must forgive nature a thousand graceful
  subtleties.

• Post Mortem Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment,
  they have had what they wanted,
  No hard gifts; the unhappy
  Linger a space, but pain is a thing that is glad to be forgotten;
  but one who has given
  His heart to a cause or a country,
  His ghost may spaniel it a while, disconsolate to watch it.
  
  I was
  wondering how long the spirit
  That sheds this verse will remain
  When the nostrils are nipped, when the brain rots in its vault
  or bubbles in the violence of fire
  To be ash in metal.
  
  I was thinking
  Some stalks of the wood whose roots I married to the earth of
  this place will stand five centuries;
  I held the roots in my hand,
  The stems of the trees between two fingers: how many remote
  generations of women
  Will drink joy from men's loins,
  And dragged from between the thighs of what mothers will
  giggle at my ghost when it curses the axemen,
  Gray impotent voice on the sea-wind,
  When the last trunk falls?
  
  The women's abundance will have
  built roofs over all this foreland;
  Will have buried the rock foundations
  I laid here: the women's exuberance will canker and fail in its
  time and like clouds the houses
  Unframe, the granite of the prime
  Stand from the heaps: come storm and wash clean: the plaster
  is all run to the sea and the steel
  All rusted; the foreland resumes
  The form we loved when we saw it.
  
  Though one at the end of
  the age and far off from this place
  Should meet my presence in a poem,
  The ghost would not care but be here, long sunset shadow in the
  seams of the granite, and forgotten
  The flesh, a spirit for the stone.

• Practical People Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Practical people, I have been told,
  Weary of the sea for his waves go up and down
  Endlessly to no visible purpose;
  Tire of the tides, for the tides are tireless, the tides
  Are well content with their own march-tune
  And nothing accomplished is no matter to them.
  
  It seems wasteful to practical people.
  
  And that the nations labor and gather and dissolve
  Into destruction; the stars sharpen
  Their spirit of splendor, and then it dims, and the stars
  Darken; and that the spirit of man
  Sharpens up to maturity and cools dull
  With age, dies, and rusts out of service;
  And all these tidal gatherings, growth and decay,
  Shining and darkening, are forever
  Renewed; and the whole cycle impenitently
  Revolves, and all the past is future:---
  Make it a difficult world .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  for practical people.

• Praise Life Read Poem Log in to favourite

  This country least, but every inhabited country
  Is clotted with human anguish.
  
  Remember that at your feasts.
  
  And this is no new thing but from time out of mind,
  No transient thing, but exactly
  Conterminous with human life.
  
  Praise life, it deserves praise, but the praise of life
  That forgets the pain is a pebble
  Rattled in a dry gourd.

• Promise Of Peace Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The heads of strong old age are beautiful
  Beyond all grace of youth.
  
  They have strange quiet,
  Integrity, health, soundness, to the full
  They've dealt with life and been tempered by it.
  
  A young man must not sleep; his years are war,
  Civil and foreign but the former's worse;
  But the old can breathe in safety now that they are
  Forgetting what youth meant, the being perverse,
  Running the fool's gauntlet and being cut
  By the whips of the five senses.
  
  As for me,
  If I should wish to live long it were but
  To trade those fevers for tranquillity,
  Thinking though that's entire and sweet in the grave
  How shall the dead taste the deep treasure they have?

• Quia Absurdum Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless
  Pool of the stars.
  
  (Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.
  
  )
  Guard yourself from perceiving the inherent nastiness of man and woman.
  
  (Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.
  
  )
  Faith, as they now confess, is preposterous, an act of will.
  
  Choose the Christian sheep-cote
  Or the Communist rat-fight: faith will cover your head from the man-devouring stars.

• Rearmament Read Poem Log in to favourite

  These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur
  of the mass
  Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
  For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it
  seem monstrous
  To admire the tragic beauty they build.
  
  It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
  Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
  Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
  The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
  Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and
  kissing.
  
  I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
  To change the future .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I should do foolishly.
  
  The beauty
  of modern
  Man is not in the persons but in the
  Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
  Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

• Return Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A little too abstract, a little too wise,
  It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
  It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
  Let the rich life run to the roots again.
  
  I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers
  And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
  
  I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
  In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
  
  I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
  That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
  The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
  So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.
  
  Things are the hawk's food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble
  Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.

• Roan Stallion Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The dog barked; then the woman stood in the doorway, and hearing
  iron strike stone down the steep road
  Covered her head with a black shawl and entered the light rain;
  she stood at the turn of the road.
  
  A nobly formed woman; erect and strong as a new tower; the
  features stolid and dark
  But sculptured into a strong grace; straight nose with a high bridge,
  firm and wide eyes, full chin,
  Red lips; she was only a fourth part Indian; a Scottish sailor had
  planted her in young native earth,
  Spanish and Indian, twenty-one years before.
  
  He had named her
  California when she was born;
  That was her name; and had gone north.
  
  She heard the hooves and
  wheels come nearer, up the steep road.
  
  The buckskin mare, leaning against the breastpiece, plodded into
  sight round the wet bank.
  
  The pale face of the driver followed; the burnt-out eyes; they had
  fortune in them.
  
  He sat twisted
  On the seat of the old buggy, leading a second horse by a long
  halter, a roan, a big one,
  That stepped daintily; by the swell of the neck, a stallion.
  
  "What
  have you got, Johnny?
  
  " "Maskerel's stallion.
  
  Mine now.
  
  I won him last night, I had very good luck.
  
  " He was
  quite drunk, "They bring their mares up here now.
  
  I keep this fellow.
  
  I got money besides, but I'll not show you.
  
  "
  "Did you buy something, Johnny,
  For our Christine?
  
  Christmas comes in two days, Johnny.
  
  " "By
  God, forgot," he answered laughing.
  
  "Don't tell Christine it's Christmas; after while I get her something,
  maybe.
  
  " But California:
  "I shared your luck when you lost: you lost me once, Johnny, remember?
  
  Tom Dell had me two nights
  Here in the house: other times we've gone hungry: now that
  you've won, Christine will have her Christmas.
  
  We share your luck, Johnny.
  
  You give me money, I go down to
  Monterey to-morrow,
  Buy presents for Christine, come back in the evening.
  
  Next day
  Christmas.
  
  " "You have wet ride," he answered
  Giggling.
  
  "Here money.
  
  Five dollar; ten; twelve dollar.
  
  You
  buy two bottles of rye whiskey for Johnny.
  
  "
  A11 right.
  
  I go to-morrow.
  
  "
  He was an outcast Hollander; not
  old, but shriveled with bad living.
  
  The child Christine inherited from his race blue eyes, from his
  life a wizened forehead; she watched
  From the house-door her father lurch out of the buggy and lead
  with due respect the stallion
  To the new corral, the strong one; leaving the wearily breathing
  buckskin mare to his wife to unharness.
  
  Storm in the night; the rain on the thin shakes of the roof like
  the ocean on rock streamed battering; once thunder
  Walked down the narrow canyon into Carmel valley and wore
  away westward; Christine was wakeful
  With fears and wonders; her father lay too deep for storm to
  touch him.
  
  Dawn comes late in the year's dark,
  Later into the crack of a canyon under redwoods; and California
  slipped from bed
  An hour before it; the buckskin would be tired; there was a little
  barley, and why should Johnny
  Feed all the barley to his stallion?
  
  That is what he would do.
  
  She
  tip-toed out of the room.
  
  Leaving her clothes, he'd waken if she waited to put them on,
  and passed from the door of the house
  Into the dark of the rain; the big black drops were cold through
  the thin shift, but the wet earth
  Pleasant under her naked feet.
  
  There was a pleasant smell in the
  stable; and moving softly,
  Touching things gently with the supple bend of the unclothed
  body, was pleasant.
  
  She found a box,
  Filled it with sweet dry barley and took it down to the old
  corral.
  
  The little mare sighed deeply
  At the rail in the wet darkness; and California returning between
  two redwoods up to the house
  Heard the happy jaws grinding the grain.
  
  Johnny could mind
  the pigs and chickens.
  
  Christine called to her
  When she entered the house, but slept again under her hand.
  
  She
  laid the wet night-dress on a chair-back
  And stole into the bedroom to get her clothes.
  
  A plank creaked,
  and he wakened.
  
  She stood motionless
  Hearing him stir in the bed.
  
  When he was quiet she stooped after
  her shoes, and he said softly,
  "What are you doing?
  
  Come back to bed.
  
  " "It's late, I'm going
  to Monterey, I must hitch up.
  
  "
  "You come to bed first.
  
  I been away three days.
  
  I give you money,
  I take back the money
  And what you do in town then?
  
  " she sighed sharply and came to
  the bed.
  
  He reaching his hands from it
  Felt the cool curve and firmness of her flank, and half rising
  caught her by the long wet hair.
  
  She endured, and to hasten the act she feigned desire; she had not
  for long, except in dream, felt it.
  
  Yesterday's drunkenness made him sluggish and exacting; she
  saw, turning her head sadly,
  The windows were bright gray with dawn; he embraced her still,
  stopping to talk about the stallion.
  
  At length she was permitted to put on her clothes.
  
  Clear daylight
  over the steep hills;
  Gray-shining cloud over the tops of the redwoods; the winter
  stream sang loud; the wheels of the buggy
  Slipped m deep slime, ground on washed stones at the road-edge.
  
  Down the hill the wrinkled river smothered the ford.
  
  You must keep to the bed of stones: she knew the way by willow
  and alder: the buckskin halted mid-stream,
  Shuddering, the water her own color washing up to the traces;
  but California, drawing up
  Her feet out of the whirl onto the seat of the buggy swung the
  whip over the yellow water
  And drove to the road.
  
  All morning the clouds were racing northward
  like a river.
  
  At noon they thickened.
  
  When California faced the southwind home from Monterey it
  was heavy with level rainfall.
  
  She looked seaward from the foot of the valley; red rays cried
  sunset from a trumpet of streaming
  Cloud over Lobos, the southwest Occident of the solstice.
  
  Twilight
  came soon, but the tired mare
  Feared the road more than the whip.
  
  Mile after mile of slow
  gray twilight.
  
  Then, quite suddenly, darkness.
  
  "Christine will be asleep.
  
  It is Christmas Eve.
  
  The ford.
  
  That hour
  of daylight wasted this morning!"
  She could see nothing; she let the reins lie on the dashboard and
  knew at length by the cramp of the wheels
  And the pitch down, they had reached it.
  
  Noise of wheels on
  stones, plashing of hooves in water; a world
  Of sounds; no sight; the gentle thunder of water; the mare snorting,
  dipping her head, one knew,
  To look for footing, in the blackness, under the stream.
  
  The
  hushing and creaking of the sea-wind
  In the passion of invisible willows.
  
  The mare stood still; the woman
  shouted to her; spared whip,
  For a false leap would lose the track of the ford.
  
  She stood.
  
  "The baby's things," thought California,
  "Under the seat: the water will come over the floor"; and rising
  in the midst of the water
  She tilted the seat; fetched up the doll, the painted wooden chickens,
  the woolly bear, the book
  Of many pictures, the box of sweets: she brought them all from
  under the seat and stored them, trembling,
  Under her clothes, about the breasts, under the arms; the corners
  of the cardboard boxes
  Cut into the soft flesh; but with a piece of rope for a girdle and
  wound about the shoulders
  All was made fast.
  
  The mare stood still as if asleep in the midst
  of the water.
  
  Then California
  Reached out a hand over the stream and fingered her rump; the
  solid wet convexity of it
  Shook like the beat of a great heart.
  
  "What are you waiting
  for?
  
  " But the feel of the animal surface
  Had wakened a dream, obscured real danger with a dream of
  danger.
  
  "What for?
  
  For the water-stallion
  To break out of the stream, that is what the rump strains for,
  him to come up flinging foam sidewise,
  Fore-hooves in air, crush me and the rig and curl over his
  woman.
  
  " She flung out with the whip then,
  The mare plunged forward.
  
  The buggy drifted sidelong: was
  she off ground?
  
  Swimming?
  
  No: by the splashes.
  
  The driver, a mere prehensile instinct, clung to the side-irons
  of the seat and felt the force
  But not the coldness of the water, curling over her knees, breaking
  up to the waist
  Over her body.
  
  They'd turned.
  
  The mare had turned up stream
  and was wallowing back into shoal water.
  
  Then California dropped her forehead to her knees, having seen
  nothing, feeling a danger,
  And felt the brute weight of a branch of alder, the pendulous
  light leaves brush her bent neck
  Like a child's fingers.
  
  The mare burst out of water and stopped
  on the slope to the ford.
  
  The woman climbed down
  Between the wheels and went to her head.
  
  "Poor Dora," she
  called her by her name, "there, Dora.
  
  Quietly,"
  And led her around, there was room to turn on the margin, the
  head to the gentle thunder of the water.
  
  She crawled on hands and knees, felt for the ruts, and shifted
  the wheels into them.
  
  "You can see, Dora.
  
  I can't.
  
  But this time you'll go through it.
  
  " She climbed into the
  seat and shouted angrily.
  
  The mare
  Stopped, her two forefeet in the water.
  
  She touched with the
  whip.
  
  The mare plodded ahead and halted.
  
  Then California thought of prayer: "Dear little Jesus,
  Dear baby Jesus born to-night, your head was shining
  Like silver candles.
  
  I've got a baby too, only a girl.
  
  You had light
  wherever you walked.
  
  Dear baby Jesus give me light.
  
  " Light streamed: rose, gold, rich
  purple, hiding the ford like a curtain.
  
  The gentle thunder of water was a noise of wing-feathers, the
  fans of paradise lifting softly.
  
  The child afloat on radiance had a baby face, but the angels had
  birds' heads, hawks' heads,
  Bending over the baby, weaving a web of wings about him.
  
  He
  held in the small fat hand
  A little snake with golden eyes, and California could see clearly
  on the under radiance
  The mare's pricked ears, a sharp black fork against the shining
  light-fall.
  
  But it dropped; the light of heaven
  Frightened poor Dora.
  
  She backed; swung up the water,
  And nearly oversetting the buggy turned and scrambled backward;
  the iron wheel-tires rang on boulders.
  
  Then California weeping climbed between the wheels.
  
  Her wet
  clothes and the toys packed under
  Dragged her down with their weight; she stripped off cloak and
  dress and laid the baby's things in the buggy;
  Brought Johnny's whiskey out from under the seat; wrapped all
  in the dress, bottles and toys, and tied them
  Into a bundle that would sling over her back.
  
  She unharnessed
  the mare, hurting her fingers
  Against the swollen straps and the wet buckles.
  
  She tied the pack
  over her shoulders, the cords
  Crossing her breasts, and mounted.
  
  She drew up her shift about
  her waist and knotted it, naked thighs
  Clutching the sides of the mare, bare flesh to the wet withers, and
  caught the mane with her right hand,
  The looped-up bridle-reins in the other.
  
  "Dora, the baby gives
  you light.
  
  " The blinding radiance
  Hovered the ford.
  
  "Sweet baby Jesus give us light.
  
  " Cataracts of
  light and Latin singing
  Fell through the willows; the mare snorted and reared: the roar
  and thunder of the invisible water;
  The night shaking open like a flag, shot with the flashes; the
  baby face hovering; the water
  Beating over her shoes and stockings up to the bare thighs; and
  over them, like a beast
  Lapping her belly; the wriggle and pitch of the mare swimming;
  the drift, the sucking water; the blinding
  Light above and behind with not a gleam before, in the throat
  of darkness; the shock of the fore-hooves
  Striking bottom, the struggle and surging lift of the haunches.
  
  She felt the water streaming off her
  From the shoulders down; heard the great strain and sob of the
  mare's breathing, heard the horseshoes grind on gravel.
  
  When California came home the dog at the door snuffed at her
  without barking; Christine and Johnny
  Both were asleep; she did not sleep for hours, but kindled fire
  and knelt patiently over it,
  Shaping and drying the dear-bought gifts for Christmas morning.
  
  She hated (she thought) the proud-necked stallion.
  
  He'd lean the big twin masses of his breast on the rail, his redbrown
  eyes flash the white crescents,
  She admired him then, she hated him for his uselessness, serving
  nothing
  But Johnny's vanity.
  
  Horses were too cheap to breed.
  
  She thought,
  if he could range in freedom,
  Shaking the red-roan mane for a flag on the bare hills.
  
  A man
  brought up a mare in April;
  Then California, though she wanted to watch, stayed with Christine
  indoors.
  
  When the child fretted
  The mother told her once more about the miracle of the ford;
  her prayer to the little Jesus
  The Christmas Eve when she was bringing the gifts home; the
  appearance, the lights, the Latin singing,
  The thunder of wing-feathers and water, the shining child, the
  cataracts of splendor down the darkness.
  
  "A little baby," Christine asked, "the God is a baby?
  
  " "The child
  of God.
  
  That was his birthday.
  
  His mother was named Mary: we pray to her too: God came to
  her.
  
  He was not the child of a man
  Like you or me.
  
  God was his father: she was the stallion's wife-
  what did I say God's wife,"
  She said with a cry, lifting Christine aside, pacing the planks of
  the floor.
  
  "She is called more blessed
  Than any woman.
  
  She was so good, she was more loved.
  
  " "Did
  God live near her house?
  
  " "He lives
  Up high, over the stars; he ranges on the bare blue hill of the
  sky.
  
  " In her mind a picture
  Flashed, of the red-roan mane shaken out for a flag on the bare
  hills, and she said quickly, "He's more
  Like a great man holding the sun in his hand.
  
  " Her mind giving
  her words the lie, "But no one
  Knows, only the shining and the power.
  
  The power, the terror,
  the burning fire covered her over .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  "Was she burnt up, mother?
  
  " "She was so good and lovely, she
  was the mother of the little Jesus.
  
  If you are good nothing will hurt you.
  
  " "What did she think?
  
  "
  "She loved, she was not afraid of the hooves
  Hands that had made the hills and sun and moon, and the sea
  and the great redwoods, the terrible strength,
  She gave herself without thinking.
  
  " "You only saw the baby,
  mother?
  
  " "Yes, and the angels about him,
  The great wild shining over the black river.
  
  " Three times she
  had walked to the door, three times returned,
  And now the hand that had thrice hung on the knob, full of
  prevented action, twisted the cloth
  Of the child's dress that she had been mending.
  
  "Oh, oh, I've
  torn it.
  
  " She struck at the child and then embraced her
  Fiercely, the small blonde sickly body.
  
  Johnny came in, his face
  reddened as if he had stood
  Near fire, his eyes triumphing.
  
  "Finished," he said, and looked
  with malice at Christine.
  
  "I go
  Down valley with Jim Carrier; owes me five dollar, fifteen I
  charge him, he brought ten in his pocket.
  
  Has grapes on the ranch, maybe I take a barrel red wine instead
  of money.
  
  Be back to-morrow.
  
  To-morrow night I tell you-Eh, Jim," he laughed over his
  shoulder, "I say to-morrow evening
  I show her how the red fellow act, the big fellow.
  
  When I come
  home.
  
  " She answered nothing, but stood
  In front of the door, holding the little hand of her daughter, in the
  path of sun between the redwoods,
  While Johnny tied the buckskin mare behind Carrier's buggy,
  and bringing saddle and bridle tossed them
  Under the seat.
  
  Jim Carrier's mare, the bay, stood with drooped
  head and started slowly, the men
  Laughing and shouting at her; their voices could be heard down
  the steep road, after the noise
  Of the iron-hooped wheels died from the stone.
  
  Then one might
  hear the hush of the wind in the tall redwoods,
  The tinkle of the April brook, deep in its hollow.
  
  Humanity is
  the start of the race; I say
  Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break
  through, the coal to break into fire,
  The atom to be split.
  
  Tragedy that breaks man's face and a white
  fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
  Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural
  crime, inhuman science,
  Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature,
  the wild fcnce-vaulter science,
  Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning
  demons that make an atom,
  These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly
  with fierce voices: not in a man's shape
  He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on die
  Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
  The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this
  cosmos?
  
  For him, the last
  Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the
  mould to break away from, the coal
  To break into fire, the atom to be split.
  
  After the child slept, after
  the leopard-footed evening
  Had glided oceanward, California turned the lamp to its least
  flame and glided from the house.
  
  She moved sighing, like a loose fire, backward and forward on
  the smooth ground by the door.
  
  She heard the night-wind that draws down the valley like the
  draught in a flue under clear weather
  Whisper and toss in the tall redwoods; she heard the tinkle of
  the April brook deep in its hollow.
  
  Cooled by the night the odors that the horses had left behind
  were in her nostrils; the night
  Whitened up the bare hill; a drift of coyotes by the river cried
  bitterly against moonrise;
  Then California ran to the old corral, the empty one where they
  kept the buckskin mare,
  And leaned, and bruised her breasts on the rail, feeling the sky
  whiten.
  
  When the moon stood over the hill
  She stole to the house.
  
  The child breathed quietly.
  
  Herself: to
  sleep?
  
  She had seen Christ in the night at Christmas.
  
  The hills were shining open to the enormous night of the April
  moon: empty and empty,
  The vast round backs of the bare hills?
  
  If one should ride up
  high might not the Father himself
  Be seen brooding His night, cross-legged, chin in hand, squatting
  on the last dome?
  
  More likely
  Leaping the hills, shaking the red-roan mane for a flag on the
  bare hills.
  
  She blew out the lamp.
  
  Every fiber of flesh trembled with faintness when she came to
  the door; strength lacked, to wander
  Afoot into the shining of the hill, high enough, high enough .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the hateful face of a man had taken
  The strength that might have served her, the corral was empty.
  
  The dog followed her, she caught him by the collar,
  Dragged him in fierce silence back to the door of the house,
  latched him inside.
  
  It was like daylight
  Outdoors and she hastened without faltering down the footpath,
  through the dark fringe of twisted oak-brush,
  To the open place in a bay of the hill.
  
  The dark strength of the
  stallion had heard her coming; she heard him
  Blow the shining air out of his nostrils, she saw him in the white
  lake of moonlight
  Move like a lion along the timbers of the fence, shaking the
  nightfall
  Of the great mane; his fragrance came to her; she leaned on the
  fence;
  He drew away from it, the hooves making soft thunder in the
  trodden soil.
  
  Wild love had trodden it, his wrestling with the stranger, the
  shame of the day
  Had stamped it into mire and powder when the heavy fetlocks
  Strained the soft flanks.
  
  "Oh, if I could bear you!
  If I had the strength.
  
  O great God that came down to Mary,
  gently you came.
  
  But I will ride him
  Up into the hill, if he throws me, if he tramples me, is it not
  my desire
  To endure death?
  
  " She climbed the fence, pressing her body
  against the rail, shaking like fever,
  And dropped inside to the soft ground.
  
  He neither threatened
  her with his teeth nor fled from her coming,
  And lifting her hand gently to the upflung head she caught
  the strap of the headstall,
  That hung under the quivering chin.
  
  She unlooped the halter
  from the high strength of the neck
  And the arch the storm-cloud mane hung with live darkness.
  
  He
  stood; she crushed her breasts
  On the hard shoulder, an arm over the withers, the other under
  the mass of his throat, and murmuring
  Like a mountain dove, "If I could bear you.
  
  " No way, no help,
  a gulf in nature.
  
  She murmured, "Come,
  We will run on the hill.
  
  O beautiful, O beautiful," and led him
  To the gate and flung the bars on the ground.
  
  He threw his head
  downward
  To snuff at the bars; and while he stood, she catching mane and
  withers with all sudden contracture
  And strength of her lithe body, leaped, clung hard, and was
  mounted.
  
  He had been ridden before; he did not
  Fight the weight but ran like a stone falling;
  Broke down the slope into the moon-glass of the stream, and
  flattened to his neck
  She felt the branches of a buckeye tree fly over her, saw the
  wall of the oak-scrub
  End her world: but he turned there, the matted branches
  Scraped her right knee, the great slant shoulders
  Laboring the hill-slope, up, up, the clear hill.
  
  Desire had died
  in her
  At the first rush, the falling like death, but now it revived,
  She feeling between her thighs the labor of the great engine, the
  running muscles, the hard swiftness,
  She riding the savage and exultant strength of the world.
  
  Having
  topped the thicket he turned eastward,
  Running less wildly; and now at length he felt the halter when
  she drew on it; she guided him upward;
  He stopped and grazed on the great arch and pride of the hill,
  the silent calvary.
  
  A dwarfish oakwood
  Climbed the other slope out of the dark of the unknown canyon
  beyond; the last wind-beaten bush of it
  Crawled up to the height, and California slipping from her mount
  tethered him to it.
  
  She stood then,
  Shaking.
  
  Enormous films of moonlight
  Trailed down from the height.
  
  Space, anxious whiteness, vastness.
  
  Distant beyond conception the shining ocean
  Lay light like a haze along the ledge and doubtful world's end.
  
  Little vapors gleaming, and little
  Darknesses on the far chart underfoot symbolized wood and
  valley; but the air was the element, the moon-
  Saturate arcs and spires of the air.
  
  Here is solitude, here on the
  calvary, nothing conscious
  But the possible God and the cropped grass, no witness, no eye
  but that misformed one, the moon's past fullness.
  
  Two figures on the shining hill, woman and stallion, she kneeling
  to him, brokenly adoring.
  
  He cropping the grass, shifting his hooves, or lifting the long
  head to gaze over the world,
  Tranquil and powerful.
  
  She prayed aloud, "O God, I am not
  good enough, O fear, O strength, I am draggled.
  
  Johnny and other men have had me, and O clean power! Here
  am I," she said, falling before him,
  And crawled to his hooves.
  
  She lay a long while, as if asleep, in
  reach of the fore-hooves, weeping.
  
  He avoided
  Her head and the prone body.
  
  He backed at first; but later
  plucked the grass that grew by her shoulder.
  
  The small dark head under his nostrils: a small round stone, that
  smelt human, black hair growing from it:
  The skull shut the light in: it was not possible for any eyes
  To know what throbbed and shone under the sutures of the
  skull, or a shell full of lightning
  Had scared the roan strength, and he'd have broken tether,
  screaming, and run for the valley.
  
  The atom bounds-breaking,
  Nucleus to sun, electrons to planets, with recognition
  Not praying, self-equaling, the whole to the whole, the microcosm
  Not entering nor accepting entrance, more equally, more utterly,
  more incredibly conjugate
  With the other extreme and greatness; passionately perceptive of
  identity.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The fire threw up figures
  And symbols meanwhile, racial myths formed and dissolved in
  it, the phantom rulers of humanity
  That without being are yet more real than what they are born of,
  and without shape, shape that which makes them:
  The nerves and the flesh go by shadowlike, the limbs and the lives
  shadowlike, these shadows remain, these shadows
  To whom temples, to whom churches, to whom labors and wars,
  visions and dreams are dedicate:
  Out of the fire in the small round stone that black moss covered,
  a crucified man writhed up in anguish;
  A woman covered by a huge beast in whose mane the stars were
  netted, sun and moon were his eyeballs,
  Smiled under the unendurable violation, her throat swollen with
  the storm and blood-flecks gleaming
  On the stretched lips; a womanno, a dark water, split by jets
  of lightning, and after a season
  What floated up out of the furrowed water, a boat, a fish, a fire-globe?
  
  It had wings, the creature,
  And flew against the fountain of lightning, fell burnt out of the
  cloud back to the bottomless water .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Figures and symbols, castlings of the fire, played in her brain;
  but the white fire was the essence,
  The burning in the small round shell of bone that black hair
  covered, that lay by the hooves on the hilltop.
  
  She rose at length, she unknotted the halter; she walked and led
  the stallion; two figures, woman and stallion,
  Came down the silent emptiness of the dome of the hill, under
  the cataract of the moonlight.
  
  The next night there was moon through cloud.
  
  Johnny had returned
  half drunk toward evening, and California
  Who had known him for years with neither love nor loathing
  to-night hating him had let the child Christine
  Play in the light of the lamp for hours after her bedtime; who
  fell asleep at length on the floor
  Beside the dog; then Johnny: "Put her to bed.
  
  " She gathered the
  child against her breasts, she laid her
  In the next room, and covered her with a blanket.
  
  The window
  was white, the moon had risen.
  
  The mother
  Lay down by the child, but after a moment Johnny stood in
  the doorway.
  
  "Come drink.
  
  " He had brought home
  Two jugs of wine slung from the saddle, part payment for the
  stallion's service; a pitcher of it
  Was on the table, and California sadly came and emptied her
  glass.
  
  Whiskey, she thought,
  Would have erased him till to-morrow; the thin red wine.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "We have a good evening," he laughed, pouring it.
  
  "One glass yet then I show you what the red fellow did.
  
  " She
  moving toward the house-door his eyes
  Followed her, the glass filled and the red juice ran over the table.
  
  When it struck the floor-planks
  He heard and looked.
  
  "Who stuck the pig?
  
  " he muttered stupidly,
  "here's blood, here's blood," and trailed his fingers
  In the red lake under the lamplight.
  
  While he was looking down
  the door creaked, she had slipped outdoors,
  And he, his mouth curving like a faun's imagined the chase under
  the solemn redwoods, the panting
  And unresistant victim caught in a dark corner.
  
  He emptied the
  glass and went outdoors
  Into the dappled lanes of moonlight.
  
  No sound but the April
  brook's.
  
  "Hey Bruno," he called, "find her.
  
  Bruno, go find her.
  
  " The dog after a little understood and quested,
  the man following.
  
  When California crouching by an oak-bush above the house
  heard them come near she darted
  To the open slope and ran down hill.
  
  The dog barked at her
  heels, pleased with the game, and Johnny
  Followed in silence.
  
  She ran down to the new corral, she saw
  the stallion
  Move like a lion along the timbers of the fence, the dark arched
  neck shaking the nightfall
  Of the great mane; she threw herself prone and writhed under
  the bars, his hooves backing away from her
  Made muffled thunder in the soft soil.
  
  She stood in the midst of
  the corral, panting, but Johnny
  Paused at the fence.
  
  The dog ran under it, and seeing the stallion
  move, the woman standing quiet,
  Danced after the beast, with white-tooth feints and dashes.
  
  When
  Johnny saw the formidable dark strength
  Recoil from the dog, he climbed up over the fence.
  
  The child Christine waked when her mother left her
  And lay half dreaming, in the half-waking dream she saw the
  ocean come up out of the west
  And cover the world, she looked up through clear water at the
  tops of the redwoods.
  
  She heard the door creak
  And the house empty; her heart shook her body, sitting up on the
  bed, and she heard the dog
  And crept toward light, where it gleamed under the crack of the
  door.
  
  She opened the door, the room was empty,
  The table-top was a red lake under the lamplight.
  
  The color of
  it was terrible to her;
  She had seen the red juice drip from a coyote's muzzle her father
  had shot one day in the hills
  And carried him home over the saddle: she looked at the rifle on
  the wall-rack: it was not moved:
  She ran to the door, the dog was barking and the moon was
  shining: she knew wine by the odor
  But the color frightened her, the empty house frightened her,
  she followed down hill in the white lane of moonlight
  The friendly noise of the dog.
  
  She saw in the big horse's corral,
  on the level shoulder of the hill,
  Black on white, the dark strength of the beast, the dancing fury
  of the dog, and the two others.
  
  One fled, one followed; the big one charged, rearing; one fell
  under his fore-hooves.
  
  She heard her mother
  Scream: without thought she ran to the house, she dragged a
  chair past the red pool and climbed to the rifle,
  Got it down from the wall and lugged it somehow through the
  door and down the hillside, under the hard weight
  Sobbing.
  
  Her mother stood by the rails of the corral, she gave
  it to her.
  
  On the far side
  The dog flashed at the plunging stallion; in the midst of the space
  the man, slow-moving, like a hurt worm
  Crawling, dragged his body by inches toward the fence-line.
  
  Then
  California, resting the rifle
  On the top rail, without doubting, without hesitance,
  Aimed for the leaping body of the dog, and when it stood, fired.
  
  It snapped, rolled over, lay quiet.
  
  "O mother you've hit Bruno!" "I couldn't see the sights in the
  moonlight!' she answered quietly.
  
  She stood
  And watched, resting the rifle-butt on the ground.
  
  The stallion
  wheeled, freed from his torment, the man
  Lurched up to his knees, wailing a thin and bitter bird's cry, and
  the roan thunder
  Struck; hooves left nothing alive but teeth tore up the remnant.
  
  "O mother, shoot, shoot!" Yet California
  Stood carefully watching, till the beast having fed all his fury
  stretched neck to utmost, head high,
  And wrinkled back the upper lip from the teeth, yawning obscene
  disgust over not a man
  A smear on the moon-like earth: then California moved by some
  obscure human fidelity
  Lifted the rifle.
  
  Each separate nerve-cell of her brain flaming the
  stars fell from their places
  Crying in her mind: she fired three times before the haunches
  crumpled sidewise, the forelegs stiffening,
  And the beautiful strength settled to earth: she turned then on
  her little daughter the mask of a woman
  Who has killed God.
  
  The night-wind veering, the smell of the
  spilt wine drifted down hill from the house.

• Rock And Hawk Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Here is a symbol in which
  Many high tragic thoughts
  Watch their own eyes.
  
  This gray rock, standing tall
  On the headland, where the seawind
  Lets no tree grow,
  Earthquake-proved, and signatured
  By ages of storms: on its peak
  A falcon has perched.
  
  I think here is your emblem
  To hang in the future sky;
  Not the cross, not the hive,
  But this; bright power, dark peace;
  Fierce consciousness joined with final
  Disinterestedness;
  Life with calm death; the falcon's
  Realist eyes and act
  Married to the massive
  Mysticism of stone,
  Which failure cannot cast down
  Nor success make proud.

• Salmon-Fishing Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The days shorten, the south blows wide for showers now,
  The south wind shouts to the rivers,
  The rivers open their mouths and the salt salmon
  Race up into the freshet.
  
  In Christmas month against the smoulder and menace
  Of a long angry sundown,
  Red ash of the dark solstice, you see the anglers,
  Pitiful, cruel, primeval,
  Like the priests of the people that built Stonehengc,
  Dark silent forms, performing
  Remote solemnities in the red shallows
  Of the river's mouth at the year's turn,
  Drawing landward their live bullion, the bloody mouths
  And scales full of the sunset
  Twitch on the rocks, no more to wander at will
  The wild Pacific pasture nor wanton and spawning
  Race up into fresh water.

• Science Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Man, introverted man, having crossed
  In passage and but a little with the nature of things this latter
  century
  Has begot giants; but being taken up
  Like a maniac with self-love and inward conflicts cannot manage
  his hybrids.
  
  Being used to deal with edgeless dreams,
  Now he's bred knives on nature turns them also inward: they
  have thirsty points though.
  
  His mind forebodes his own destruction;
  Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among leaves and his hounds
  tore him.
  
  A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
  A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely
  little too much?

• Second-Best Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A Celtic spearman forcing the cromlech-builder's brown
  daughter;
  A blond Saxon, a slayer of Britons,
  Building his farm outside the village he'd burned; a Norse
  Voyager, wielder of oars and a sword,
  Thridding the rocks at the fjord sea-end, hungry as a hawk;
  A hungry Gaelic chiefling in Ulster,
  Whose blood with the Norseman's rotted in the rain on a heather
  hill:
  These by the world's time were very recent
  Forefathers of yours.
  
  And you are a maker of verses.
  
  The pallid
  Pursuit of the world's beauty on paper,
  Unless a tall angel comes to require it, is a pitiful pastime.
  
  If, burnished new from God's eyes, an angel:
  And the ardors of the simple blood showing clearly a little
  ridiculous
  In this changed world: write and be quiet.

• Self-Criticism In February Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The bay is not blue but sombre yellow
  With wrack from the battered valley, it is speckled with violent
  foam-heads
  And tiger-striped with long lovely storm-shadows.
  
  You love this better than the other mask; better eyes than yours
  Would feel the equal beauty in the blue.
  
  It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately.
  
  But the present time is not pastoral, but founded
  On violence, pointed for more massive violence: perhaps it is not
  Perversity but need that perceives the storm-beauty.
  
  Well, bite on this: your poems are too full of ghosts and demons,
  And people like phantoms how often life's are
  And passion so strained that the clay mouths go praying for destruction
  Alas, it is not unusual in life;
  To every soul at some time.
  
  But 'why insist on it?
  
  And now
  For the worst fault: you have never mistaken
  Demon nor passion nor idealism for the real God.
  
  Then what is most disliked in those verses
  Remains most true.
  
  Unfortunately.
  
  If only you could sing
  That God is love, or perhaps that social
  Justice will soon prevail.
  
  I can tell lies in prose.

• Shakespeare’s Grave Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Doggerel," he thought, "will do for church-wardens,
  Poetry's precious enough not to be wasted,"
  And rhymed it all out with a skew smile:
  "Spare these stones.
  
  Curst be he that moves my bones-
  Will hold the hands of masons and grave-diggers.
  
  "
  But why did the good man care?
  
  For he wanted quietness.
  
  He had tasted enough life in his time
  To stuff a thousand; he wanted not to swim wide
  In waters, nor wander the enormous air,
  Nor grow into grass, enter through the mouths of cattle
  The bodies of lusty women and warriors,
  But all be finished.
  
  He knew it feelingly; the game
  Of the whirling circles had become tiresome.
  
  "Annihilation's impossible, but insulated
  In the church under the rhyming flagstone
  Perhaps my passionate ruins may be kept off market
  To the end of this age.
  
  Oh, a thousand years
  Will hardly leach," he thought, "this dust of that fire.
  
  "

• Shane O’Neill’s Cairn Read Poem Log in to favourite

  TO U.
  
  J.
  
  When you and I on the Palos Verdes cliff
  Found life more desperate than dear,
  And when we hawked at it on the lake by Seattle,
  In the west of the world, where hardly
  Anything has died yet: we'd not have been sorry, Una,
  But surprised, to foresee this gray
  Coast in our days, the gray waters of the Moyle
  Below us, and under our feet
  The heavy black stones of the cairn of the lord of Ulster.
  
  A man of blood who died bloodily
  Four centuries ago: but death's nothing, and life,
  From a high death-mark on a headland
  Of this dim island of burials, is nothing either.
  
  How beautiful are both these nothings.

• Shine, Perishing Republic Read Poem Log in to favourite

  While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire
  And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
  I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
  
  Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
  
  You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
  A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
  
  But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
  Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.
  
  And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
  
  There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say — God, when he walked on earth.

• Shine, Republic Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of
  water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness
  And reticence: each is noble in its quality.
  
  The love of freedom
  has been the quality of Western man.
  
  There is a stubborn torch that flames from Marathon to Concord,
  its dangerous beauty binding three ages
  Into one time; the waves of barbarism and civilization have
  eclipsed but have never quenched it.
  
  For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the
  present age the passionate love of discovery;
  But in one noble passion we are one; and Washington, Luther,
  Tacitus, Aeschylus, one kind of man.
  
  And you, America, that passion made you.
  
  You were not born
  to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
  
  You did not say "en masse," you said "independence.
  
  " But we
  cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.
  
  Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry,
  and often requires blood for its fuel.
  
  You will tame it against it burn too clearly, you will hood it
  like a kept hawk, you will perch it on the wrist of Caesar.
  
  But keep the tradition, conserve the forms, the observances, keep
  the spot sore.
  
  Be great, carve deep your heel-marks.
  
  The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge
  their love of freedom with contempt of luxury.

• Shiva Read Poem Log in to favourite

  There is a hawk that is picking the birds out of our sky,
  She killed the pigeons of peace and security,
  She has taken honesty and confidence from nations and men,
  She is hunting the lonely heron of liberty.
  
  She loads the arts with nonsense, she is very cunning
  Science with dreams and the state with powers to catch them at last.
  
  Nothing will escape her at last, flying nor running.
  
  This is the hawk that picks out the star's eyes.
  
  This is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild swan;
  The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things.
  
  Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme,
  Empty darkness under the death-tent wings.
  
  She will build a nest of the swan's bones and hatch  a new brood,
  Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed.

• Shooting Season Read Poem Log in to favourite

  IN THE NORTH OF SCOTLAND
  The whole countryside deployed on the hills of heather, an army
  with banners,
  The beaters whoop the grouse to the butts.
  
  Three gentlemen fling up their guns and the frightened covey is
  a few wings fewer;
  Then grooms approach with the panniered horses.
  
  The gray old moorland silence has closed like water and covered
  the gunshots.
  
  Wave on wave goes the moor to the great
  Circle of the sky; the cairn on the slope names an old battle and
  beyond are
  Broad gray rocks the grave-marks of clans.
  
  Blond Celtic warriors lair in the sky-line barrows, down toward
  the sea
  Stand the tall stones of the Danish captains.
  
  We dead that handled weapons and hunted in earnest, we old
  dead have watched
  Three little living gentlemen yonder
  With a bitter flavor in the grin of amusement, uneasily remembering
  our own
  Old sports and delights.
  
  It is better to be dust.

• Sign-Post Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.
  
  Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
  Let that doll lie.
  
  Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
  Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
  Make your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyes
  Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.
  
  Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;
  Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain,
  For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature.
  
  At length
  You will look back along the star's rays and see that even
  The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.
  
  Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength
  And sickness; but now you are free, even to be human,
  But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.

• So Many Blood-Lakes Read Poem Log in to favourite

  We have now won two world-wars, neither of which concerned us, we were
  slipped in.
  
  We have leveled the powers
  Of Europe, that were the powers of the world, into rubble and
  dependence.
  
  We have won two wars and a third is coming.
  
  This one—will not be so easy.
  
  We were at ease while the powers of the
  world were split into factions: we've changed that.
  
  We have enjoyed fine dreams; we have dreamed of unifying the world; we
  are unifying it—against us.
  
  Two wars, and they breed a third.
  
  Now guard the beaches, watch the
  north, trust not the dawns.
  
  Probe every cloud.
  
  Build power.
  
  Fortress America may yet for a long time stand, between the
  east and the west, like Byzantium.
  
  —As for me: laugh at me.
  
  I agree with you.
  
  It is a foolish business to
  see the future and screech at it.
  
  One should watch and not speak.
  
  And patriotism has run the world through
  so many blood-lakes: and we always fall in.

• Soliloquy Read Poem Log in to favourite

  August and laurelled have been content to speak for an age,
  and the ages that follow
  Respect them for that pious fidelity;
  But you have disfeatured time for timelessness.
  
  They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths to dream of,
  rose-marble-fingered
  Women shed light down the great lines;
  But you have invoked the slime in the skull,
  The lymph in the vessels.
  
  They have shown men Gods like
  racial dreams, the woman's desire,
  The man's fear, the hawk-faced prophet's; but nothing
  Human seems happy at the feet of yours.
  
  Therefore though not forgotten, not loved, in gray old years
  in the evening leaning
  Over the gray stones of the tower-top,
  You shall be called heartless and blind;
  And watch new time answer old thought, not a face strange
  nor a pain astonishing;
  But you living be laired in the rock
  That sheds pleasure and pain like hailstones.

• Song Of Quietness Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Drink deep, drink deep of quietness,
  And on the margins of the sea
  Remember not thine old distress
  Nor all the miseries to be.
  
  Calmer than mists, and cold
  As they, that fold on fold
  Up the dim valley are rolled,
  Learn thou to be.
  
  The Past—it was a feverish dream,
  A drunken slumber full of tears.
  
  The Future—O what wild wings gleam,
  Wheeled in the van of desperate years!
  Thou lovedst the evening: dawn
  Glimmers; the night is gone:—
  What dangers lure thee on,
  What dreams more fierce?
  
  But meanwhile, now the east is gray,
  The hour is pale, the cocks yet dumb,
  Be glad before the birth of day,
  Take thy brief rest ere morning come:
  Here in the beautiful woods
  All night the sea-mist floods,—
  Thy last of solitudes,
  Thy yearlong home.

• Steelhead Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The sky was cold December blue with great tumbling clouds,
  and the little river
  Ran full but clear.
  
  A bare-legged girl
  in a red jersey was wading
  in it, holding a five-tined
  Hay-fork at her head's height; suddenly she darted it down like
  a heron's beak and panting hard
  Leaned on the shaft, looking down passionately, her gipsy-lean
  face, then stooped and dipping
  One arm to the little breasts she drew up her catch, great hammered-
  silver steelhead with the tines through it
  And the fingers of her left hand hooked in its
  gills, her slender body
  Rocked with its writhing.
  
  She took it to the near bank
  And was dropping it behind a log when someone said
  Quietly "I guess I've got you, Vina.
  
  " Who gasped and looked up
  At a young horseman half hidden in the willow bushes,
  She'd been too intent to notice him, and said "My God,
  I thought it was the game-warden.
  
  " "Worse," he said smiling.
  
  "This river's ours.
  
  You can't get near it without crossing our fences.
  
  Besides that you mustn't spear 'em, and .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  three, four, you
  little bitch,
  That's the fifth fish.
  
  " She answered with her gipsy face, "Take
  half o' them, honey.
  
  I loved the fun.
  
  "
  He looked up and down her taper legs, red with cold, and said
  fiercely, "Your fun.
  
  To kill them and leave them rotting.
  
  " "Honey, let me have one
  o' them," she answered,
  "You take the rest.
  
  " He shook his blond head.
  
  "You'll have to pay
  a terrible fine.
  
  " She answered laughing,
  "Don't worry: you wouldn't tell on me.
  
  " He dismounted and
  tied the bridle to a bough, saying "Nobody would.
  
  I know a lovely place deep in the willows, full of warm grass,
  safe as a house,
  Where you can pay it.
  
  " Her body seemed to grow narrower
  suddenly, both hands at her throat, and the cold thighs
  Pressed close together while she stared at his face, it was beautiful,
  long heavy-lidded eyes like a girl's,
  "I can't do that, honey .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I," she said shivering, "your wife
  would kill me.
  
  " He hardened his eyes and said
  "Let that alone.
  
  " "Oh," she answered; the little red hands came
  down from her breast and faintly
  Reached toward him, her head lifting, he saw the artery on the
  lit side of her throat flutter like a bird
  And said "You'll be sick with cold, Vina," flung off his coat
  And folded her in it with his warmth in it and carried her
  To that island in the willows.
  
  He warmed her bruised feet in
  his hands;
  She paid her fine for spearing fish, and another
  For taking more than the legal limit, and would willingly
  Have paid a third for trespassing; he sighed and said,
  "You'll owe me that.
  
  I'm afraid somebody might come looking
  for me,
  Or my colt break his bridle.
  
  " She moaned like a dove, "Oh Oh
  Oh Oh,
  You are beautiful, Hugh.
  
  " They returned to the stream-bank.
  
  There,
  While Vina put on her shoes-they were like a small boy's, all
  stubbed and shapeless young Flodden strung the five fish
  On a willow rod through the red gills and slung them
  To his saddle-horn.
  
  He led the horse and walked with Vina,
  going part way home with her.
  
  Toward the canyon sea-mouth
  The water spread wide and shoal, fingering through many channels
  down a broad flood-bed, and a mob of sea-gulls
  Screamed at each other.
  
  Vina said, "That's a horrible thing.
  
  "
  "What?
  
  " "What the birds do.
  
  They're worse than I am.
  
  "
  When Flodden returned alone he rode down and watched them.
  
  He saw that one of the thousand steelhead
  Which irresistible nature herded up stream to the spawning-gravel
  in the mountain, the river headwaters,
  Had wandered into a shallow finger of the current, and was
  forced over on his flank, sculling uneasily
  In three inches of water: instantly a gaunt herring-gull hovered
  and dropped, to gouge the exposed
  Eye with her beak; the great fish writhing, flopping over in his
  anguish, another gull's beak
  Took the other eye.
  
  Their prey was then at their mercy, writhing
  blind, soon stranded, and the screaming mob
  Covered him.
  
  Young Flodden rode into them and drove them
  up; he found the torn steelhead
  Still slowly and ceremoniously striking the sand with his tail and
  a bloody eye-socket, under the
  Pavilion of wings.
  
  They cast a cold shadow on the air, a fleeting
  sense of fortune's iniquities: why should
  Hugh Flodden be young and happy, mounted on a good horse,
  And have had another girl besides his dear wife, while others
  have to endure blindness and death,
  Pain and disease, misery, old age, God knows what worse?

• Still The Mind Smiles Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions,
  Knowing all the while that civilization and the other evils
  That make humanity ridiculous, remain
  Beautiful in the whole fabric, excesses that balance each other
  Like the paired wings of a flying bird.
  
  Misery and riches, civilization and squalid savagery,
  Mass war and the odor of unmanly peace:
  Tragic flourishes above and below the normal of life.
  
  In order to value this fretful time
  It is necessary to remember our norm, the unaltered passions,
  The same-colored wings of imagination,
  That the crowd clips, in lonely places new-grown; the unchanged
  Lives of herdsmen and mountain farms,
  Where men are few, and few tools, a few weapons, and their
  dawns are beautiful.
  
  From here for normal one sees both ways,
  And listens to the splendor of God, the exact poet, the sonorous
  Antistrophe of desolation to the strophe multitude.

• Subjected Earth Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Walking in the flat Oxfordshire fields
  Where the eye can find no rock to rest on but little flints
  Speckle the soil, and the million-berried hedges
  Tingle with birds at evening, I saw the sombre
  November day redden and go down; a flight of lapwings
  Whirled in the hollow of the field, and half-tame pheasants
  Cried from the trees.
  
  I remembered impatiently
  How the long bronze mountain of my own coast,
  Where color is no account and pathos ridiculous, the sculpture is all,
  Breaks the arrows of the setting sun
  Over the enormous mounded eyeball of ocean.
  
  The soft alien twilight
  Worn and weak with too much humanity hooded my mind.
  
  Poor flourishing earth, meek-smiling slave,
  If sometime the swamps return and the heavy forest, black beech
  and oak-roots
  Break up the paving of London streets;
  And only, as long before, on the lifted ridgeways
  Few people shivering by little fires
  Watch the night of the forest cover the land
  And shiver to hear the wild dogs howling where the cities were,
  Would you be glad to be free?
  
  I think you will never
  Be glad again, so kneaded with human flesh, so humbled and changed.
  
  Here all's down hill and passively goes to the grave,
  Asks only a pinch of pleasure between the darknesses,
  Contented to think that everything has been done
  That's in the scope of the race: so should I also perhaps
  Dream, under the empty angel of this twilight,
  But the great memory of that unhumanized world,
  With all its wave of good and evil to climb yet,
  Its exorbitant power to match, its heartless passion to equal,
  And all its music to make, beats on the grave-mound.

• Suicide's Stone Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Peace is the heir of dead desire,
  Whether abundance killed the cormorant
  In a happy hour, or sleep or death
  Drowned him deep in dreamy waters,
  Peace is the ashes of that fire,
  The heir of that king, the inn of that journey.
  
  This last and best and goal: we dead
  Hold it so tight you are envious of us
  And fear under sunk lids contempt.
  
  Death-day greetings are the sweetest.
  
  Let trumpets roar when a man dies
  And rockets fly up, he has found his fortune.
  
  Yet hungering long and pitiably
  That way, you shall not reach a finger
  To pluck it unripe and before dark
  Creep to cover: life broke ten whipstocks
  Over my back, broke faith, stole hope,
  Before I denounced the covenant of courage.

• Summer Holiday Read Poem Log in to favourite

  When the sun shouts and people abound
  One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of
  bronze
  And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
  Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-
  ered-up cities
  Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
  
  Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains
  will cure them,
  Then nothing will remain of the iron age
  And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
  Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
  In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the
  mountain…

• Tamar Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  A night the half-moon was like a dancing-girl,
  No, like a drunkard's last half-dollar
  Shoved on the polished bar of the eastern hill-range,
  Young Cauldwell rode his pony along the sea-cliff;
  When she stopped, spurred; when she trembled, drove
  The teeth of the little jagged wheels so deep
  They tasted blood; the mare with four slim hooves
  On a foot of ground pivoted like a top,
  Jumped from the crumble of sod, went down, caught, slipped;
  Then, the quick frenzy finished, stiffening herself
  Slid with her drunken rider down the ledges,
  Shot from sheer rock and broke
  Her life out on the rounded tidal boulders.
  
  The night you know accepted with no show of emotion the little
  accident; grave Orion
  Moved northwest from the naked shore, the moon moved to
  meridian, the slow pulse of the ocean
  Beat, the slow tide came in across the slippery stones; it drowned
  the dead mare's muzzle and sluggishly
  Felt for the rider; Cauldwell’s sleepy soul came back from the
  blind course curious to know
  What sea-cold fingers tapped the walls of its deserted ruin.
  
  Pain, pain and faintness, crushing
  Weights, and a vain desire to vomit, and soon again
  die icy fingers, they had crept over the loose hand and lay in the
  hair now.
  
  He rolled sidewise
  Against mountains of weight and for another half-hour lay still.
  
  With a gush of liquid noises
  The wave covered him head and all, his body
  Crawled without consciousness and like a creature with no bones,
  a seaworm, lifted its face
  Above the sea-wrack of a stone; then a white twilight grew about
  the moon, and above
  The ancient water, the everlasting repetition of the dawn.
  
  You
  shipwrecked horseman
  So many and still so many and now for you the last.
  
  But when it
  grew daylight
  He grew quite conscious; broken ends of bone ground on each
  other among the working fibers
  While by half-inches he was drawing himself out of the seawrack
  up to sandy granite,
  Out of the tide's path.
  
  Where the thin ledge tailed into flat cliff
  he fell asleep.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Far seaward
  The daylight moon hung like a slip of cloud against the horizon.
  
  The tide was ebbing
  From the dead horse and the black belt of sea-growth.
  
  Cauldwell
  seemed to have felt her crying beside him,
  His mother, who was dead.
  
  He thought "If I had a month or two
  of life yet
  I would remember to be decent, only it's now too late, I'm finished,
  mother, mother,
  I'm sorry.
  
  " After that he thought only of pain and raging thirst
  until the sundown
  Reddened the sea, and hands were reaching for him and drawing
  him up the cliff.
  
  His sister Tamar
  Nursed him in the big westward bedroom
  Of the old house on Point Lobos.
  
  After fever
  A wonderful day of peace and pleasant weakness
  Brought home to his heart the beauty of things.
  
  "O Tamar
  I've thrown away years like rubbish.
  
  Listen, Tamar,
  It would be better for me to be a cripple,
  Sit on the steps and watch the forest grow up the hill
  Or a new speck of moss on some old rock
  That takes ten years agrowing, than waste
  Shame and my spirit on Monterey rye whiskey,
  And worse, and worse.
  
  I shan't be a cripple, Tamar.
  
  We'll walk along the blessed old gray sea,
  And up in the hills and watch the spring come home.
  
  "
  Youth is a troublesome but a magical thing,
  There is little more to say for it when you've said
  Young bones knit easily; he that fell in December
  Walked in the February fields.
  
  His sister Tamar
  Was with him, and his mind ran on her name,
  But she was saying, "We laugh at poor Aunt Stella
  With her spirit
  visitors: Lee, something told her truth.
  
  Last August, you were hunting deer, you had been gone
  Ten days or twelve, we heard her scream at night,
  I went to the room, she told me
  She'd seen you lying all bloody on the sea-beach
  By a dead deer, its blood dabbling the black weeds of the ebb.
  
  "
  "I was up Tassajara way," he answered,
  "Far from the sea.
  
  " "We were glad when you rode home
  Safe, with the two bucks on the packhorse.
  
  But listen,
  She said she watched the stars flying over you
  In her vision, Orion she said, and made me look
  Out of her window southward, where I saw
  The stars they call the Scorpion, the red bead
  With the curling tail.
  
  Then it will be in winter,'
  She whispered to me, 'Orion is winter.
  
  '
  "Tamar, Tamar,
  Winter is over, visions are over and vanished,
  The fields are winking full of poppies,
  In a week or two I'll fill your arms with shining irises.
  
  "
  The winter sun went under and all that night there came a roaring
  from the south; Lee Cauldwell
  Lay awake and heard the tough old house creak all her timbers;
  he was miserably lonely and vacant,
  He'd put away the boyish jets of wickedness, loves with dark
  eyes in Monterey back-streets, liquor
  And all its fellowship, what was left to live for but the farmwork,
  rain would come and hinder?
  
  He heard the cypress trees that seemed to scream in the wind,
  and felt the ocean pounding granite.
  
  His father and Tamar's, the old man David Cauldwell, lay in the
  eastern chamber; when the storm
  Wakened him from the heartless fugitive slumber of age he rose
  and made a light, and lighted
  The lamp not cold yet; night and day were nearly equal to him,
  he had seen too many; he dressed
  Slowly and opened his Bible.
  
  In the neighboring rooms he heard
  on one side Stella Moreland,
  His dead wife's sister, quieting his own sister, the idiot Jinny
  Cauldwell, who laughed and chuckled
  Often for half the night long, an old woman with a child's mind
  and mostly sleepless; in the other
  Chamber Tamar was moaning, for it seemed that nightmare
  Within the house answered to storm without.
  
  To Tamar it seemed that she was walking by the seaside
  With her dear brother, who said "Here's where I fell,
  A bad girl that I knew in Monterey pushed me over the cliff,
  You can see blood still on the boulders.
  
  " Where he vanished to
  She could not tell, nor why she was crying "Lee.
  
  No.
  
  No dearest brother, dearest brother no.
  
  " But she cried vainly,
  Lee was not there to help her, a wild white horse
  Came out of the wave and trampled her with his hooves,
  The horror that she had dreaded through her dreaming
  With mystical foreknowledge.
  
  When it wakened her,
  She like her father heard old Jinny chuckling
  And Stella sighing and soothing her, and the southwind
  Raging around the gables of the house and through the forest of
  the cypresses.
  
  "When it rains it will be quieter," Tamar thought.
  
  She slept
  again, all night not a drop fell.
  
  Old Cauldwell from his window saw the cloudy light seep up
  the sky from the overhanging
  Hilltops, the dawn was dammed behind the hills but overflowed
  at last and ran down on the sea.
  
  II
  Lee Cauldwell rode across the roaring southwind to the winter
  pasture up in the hills.
  
  A hundred times he wanted Tamar, to show her some new beauty
  of canyon wildflowers, water
  Dashing its ferns, or oaktrees thrusting elbows at the wind, blackoaks
  smoldering with foliage
  And the streaked beauty of white-oak trunks, and redwood
  glens; he rode up higher across the rainwind
  And found his father's cattle in a quiet hollow among the hills,
  their horns to the wind,
  Quietly grazing.
  
  He returned another way, from the headland
  over Wildcat Canyon,
  Saw the immense water possessing all the west and saw Point Lobos
  Gemmed in it, and the barn-roofs and the house-roof
  Like ships' keels in the cypress tops, and thought of Tamar.
  
  Toward sundown he approached the house; Will Andrews
  Was leaving it and young Cauldwell said, "Listen, Bill Andrews,
  We've had gay times together and ridden at night.
  
  I've quit it, I don't want my old friends to visit my sister.
  
  Better keep off the place.
  
  " "I will," said the other,
  "When Tamar tells me to.
  
  " "You think my bones
  Aren't mended yet, better keep off.
  
  " Lee Cauldwell
  Rode by to the stable wondering why his lips
  Twitched with such bitter anger; Tamar wondered
  Why he went upstairs without a word or smile
  Of pleasure in her.
  
  The old man David Cauldwell,
  When Lee had told him news of the herd and that Ramon
  Seemed faithful, and the calves flourished, the old man answered:
  "I hear that there's a dance at Motley's Landing Saturday.
  
  You'll
  be riding
  Down the coast, Lee.
  
  Don't kill the horse, have a good time.
  
  "
  "No, I've had all I want, I'm staying
  At home now, evenings.
  
  " "Don't do it; better dance your pony
  down the cliffs again than close
  Young life into a little box; you've been too wild; now I'm worn
  out, but I remember
  Hell's in the box.
  
  " Lee answered nothing, his father's lamp of
  thought was hidden awhile in words,
  An old man's words, like the dry evening moths that choke a
  candle.
  
  A space, and he was saying,
  "Come summer we'll be mixed into the bloody squabble out there,
  and you'll be going headforemost
  Unless you make your life so pleasant you'd rather live it.
  
  I
  mayn't be living
  To see you home or hear you're killed.
  
  " Lee, smiling at him,
  "A soldier's what I won't be, father.
  
  " That night
  He dreamed himself a soldier, an aviator
  Duelling with a German above a battle
  That looked like waves, he fired his gun and mounted
  In steady rhythm; he must have been winged, he suddenly
  Plunged and went through the soft and deadly surface
  Of the deep sea, wakening in terror.
  
  He heard his old Aunt Jinny chuckling,
  Aunt Stella sighing and soothing her, and the southwind
  Raging around the gables of the house and through the forest of
  the cypresses.
  
  III
  They two had unbridled the horses
  And tied them with long halters near the thicket
  Under Mai Paso bridge and wandered east
  Into the narrow cleft, they had climbed the summit
  On the right and looked across the sea.
  
  The steep path down, "What are we for?
  
  " said Tamar wearily,
  "to want and want and not dare know it.
  
  "
  "Because I dropped the faded irises," Lee answered, "you're unhappy.
  
  They were all withered, Tamar.
  
  We have grown up in the same house.
  
  " "The withered house
  Of an old man and a withered woman and an idiot woman.
  
  No
  wonder if we go mad, no wonder.
  
  "
  They came to the hid stream and Tamar said, "Sweet, green and cool,
  After the mad white April sun: you wouldn't mind, Lee?
  
  Here where it makes a pool: you mustn't look; but you're my
  brother.
  
  And then
  I will stand guard for you.
  
  " The murmur and splash of water
  made his fever fierier; something
  Unfelt before kept his eyes seaward: why should he dread to see
  the round arm and clear throat
  Flash from the hollow stream?
  
  He trembled, thinking
  "O we are beasts, a beast, what am I for?
  
  Was the old man right, I must be drunk and a dancer and feed on
  the cheap pleasures, or it's dangerous?
  
  Lovely and thoughtless, if she knew me how she'd loathe and
  avoid me.
  
  Her brother, brother.
  
  My sister.
  
  Better the life with the bones, and all at once have broken.
  
  "
  Meanwhile Tamar
  Uneasily dipped her wrists, and crouching in the leaf-grown bank
  Saw her breasts in the dark mirror, she trembled backward
  From a long ripple and timidly wading entered
  The quiet translucence to the thighs.
  
  White-shining
  Slender and virgin pillar, desire in water
  Unhidden and half reflected among the interbranching ripples,
  Arched with alder, over-woven with willow.
  
  Ah Tamar, stricken with strange fever and feeling
  Her own desirableness, half-innocent Tamar
  Thought, "If I saw a snake in the water he would come now
  And kill the snake, he is keen and fearless but he fears
  Me I believe.
  
  " Was it the wild rock coast
  Of her breeding, and the reckless wind
  In the beaten trees and the gaunt booming crashes
  Of breakers under the rocks, or rather the amplitude
  And wing-subduing immense earth-ending water
  That moves all the west taught her this freedom?
  
  Ah Tamar,
  It was not good, not wise, not safe, not provident,
  Not even, for custom creates nature, natural,
  Though all other license were; and surely her face
  Grew lean and whitened like a mask, the lips
  Thinned their rose to a split thread, the little breasts
  Erected sharp bright buds but the white belly
  Shuddered, sucked in.
  
  The lips writhed and no voice
  Formed, and again, and a faint cry.
  
  "Tamar?
  
  "
  He answered, and she answered, "Nothing.
  
  A snake in the water
  Frightened me.
  
  " And again she called his name.
  
  "What is it, Tamar?
  
  " "Nothing.
  
  It is cold in the water.
  
  Come, Lee, I have hidden myself all but the head.
  
  Bathe, if you mean to bathe, and keep me company.
  
  I won't look till you're in.
  
  " He came, trembling.
  
  He unclothed himself in a green depth and dared not
  Enter the pool, but stared at the drawn scars
  Of the old wound on his leg.
  
  "Come, Lee, I'm freezing.
  
  Come, I won't look.
  
  " He saw the clear-skinned shoulders
  And the hollow of her back, he drowned his body
  In the watery floor under the cave of foliage,
  And heard her sobbing.
  
  When she turned, the great blue eyes
  Under the auburn hair, streamed.
  
  "Lee.
  
  We have stopped being children; I would have drowned myself;
  If you hadn't taught me swimming long ago long ago, Lee
  When we were children.
  
  " "Tamar, what is it, what is it?
  
  "
  "Only that I want .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  death.
  
  You lie if you think
  Another thing.
  
  " She slipped face down and lay
  In the harmless water, the auburn hair trailed forward
  Darkened like weeds, the double arc of the shoulders
  Floated, and when he had dragged her to the bank both arms
  Clung to him, the white body in a sobbing spasm
  Clutched him, he could not disentangle the white desire,
  So they were joined (like drowning folk brought back
  By force to bitter life) painfully, without joy.
  
  The spasm fulfilled, poor Tamar, like one drowned indeed, lay
  pale and quiet
  And careless of her nakedness.
  
  He, gulfs opening
  Between the shapes of his thought, desired to rise and leave her
  and was ashamed to.
  
  He lay by her side, the cheek he kissed was cold like a smooth
  stone, the blue eyes were half open,
  The bright smooth body seemed to have suffered pain, not love.
  
  One of her arms crushed both her breasts,
  The other lay in the grass, the fingers clutching toward the
  roots of die soft grass.
  
  "Tamar,"
  He whispered, then she breathed shudderingly and answered,
  "We have it, we have it.
  
  Now I know.
  
  It was my fault.
  
  I never shall be ashamed again.
  
  ' He said,
  "What shall I do?
  
  Go away?
  
  Kill myself, Tamar?
  
  " She contracted all her body and crouched
  in the long grass, shivering.
  
  "It hurts, there is blood here, I am too cold to bathe myself
  again.
  
  O brother, brother,
  Mine and twice mine.
  
  You knew already, a girl has got to learn.
  
  I love you, I chose my teacher.
  
  Mine, it was my doing.
  
  " She flung herself upon him, cold white
  and smooth, with sobbing kisses.
  
  "I am so cold, dearest, dearest.
  
  " The horses at the canyon mouth
  tugged at their halters,
  Dug pits under the restless forehooves, shivered in the hill-wind
  At sundown, were not ridden till dark, it was near midnight
  They came to the old house.
  
  IV
  When Jinny Cauldwell slept, the old woman with a child's mind,
  then Stella Moreland
  Invoked her childish-minded dead, or lying blank-eyed in the
  dark egged on her dreams to vision,
  Suffering for lack of audience, tasting the ecstasy of vision.
  
  This
  was the vaporous portion
  She endured her life in the strength of, in the sea-shaken loneliness,
  little loved, nursing an idiot,
  Growing bitterly old among the wind-torn Lobos cypress trunks.
  
  (O torture of needled branches
  Doubled and gnarled, never a moment of quiet, the northwind
  or the southwind or the northwest.
  
  For up and down the coast they are tall and terrible horsemen on
  patrol, alternate giants
  Guarding the granite and sand frontiers of the last ocean; but
  here at Lobos the winds are torturers,
  The old trees endure them.
  
  They blew always thwart the old
  woman's dreams and sometimes by her bedside
  Stood, the south in russety black, the north in white, but the
  northwest wave-green, sea-brilliant,
  Scaled like a fish.
  
  She had also the sun and moon and mightier
  presences in her visions.
  
  ) Tamar
  Entered the room toward morning and stood ghost-like among
  the old woman's ghosts.
  
  The rolled-up eyes,
  Dull white, with little spindles of iris touching the upper lids,
  played back the girl's blown candle
  Sightlessly, but the spirit of sight that the eyes are tools of and
  it made them, saw her.
  
  "Ah, Helen,"
  Cried out the entranced lips, "We thought you were tired of the
  wind, we thought you never came now.
  
  My sister's husband lies in the next room, go waken him, show
  him your beauty, call him with kisses.
  
  He is old and the spittle when he dreams runs into his beard, but
  he is your lover and your brother.
  
  "
  "I am not Helen," she said, "what Helen, what Helen?
  
  " "Who
  was not the wife but the sister of her man,
  Mine was his wife.
  
  " "My mother?
  
  " "And now he is an old hulk
  battered ashore.
  
  Show him your beauty,
  Strip for him, Helen, as when he made you a seaweed bed in the
  cave.
  
  What if the beard is slimy
  And the eyes run, men are not always young and fresh like you
  dead women.
  
  " But Tamar clutching
  The plump hand on the coverlet scratched it with her nails, the
  old woman groaned but would not waken,
  And Tamar held the candle flame against the hand, the soot
  striped it, then with a scream
  The old woman awoke, sat up, and fell back rigid on the bed.
  
  Tamar found place for the candle
  On a little table at the bedside, her freed hands could not awaken
  a second answer
  In the flesh that now for all its fatness felt like a warmed stone.
  
  But the idiot waked and chuckled,
  Waved both hands at the candle saying, "My little star, my little
  star, come little star.
  
  "
  And to these three old Cauldwell sighing with sleeplessness
  Entered, not noticed, and he stood in the open door.
  
  Tamar was
  bending
  Over the bed, loose hair like burnished metal
  Concealed her face and sharply cut across one rounded shoulder
  The thin night-dress had slipped from.
  
  The old man her father
  Feared, for a ghost of law-contemptuous youth
  Slid through the chilly vaults of the stiff arteries,
  And he said, "What is it, Tamar?
  
  " "She was screaming in a
  dream,
  I came to quiet her, now she has gone stiff like iron.
  
  Who is this woman Helen she was dreaming about?
  
  "
  "Helen?
  
  Helen?
  
  " he answered slowly and Tamar
  Believed she saw the beard and the hands tremble.
  
  "It's too cold for you, Tamar, go back to bed
  And I'll take care of her.
  
  A common name for women.
  
  "
  Old Jinny clapped her hands, "Little star, little star,
  Twinkle all night!" and the stiff form on the bed began to speak,
  In a changed voice and from another mode of being
  And spirit of thought: "I cannot think that you have forgotten.
  
  I was walking on the far side of the moon,
  Whence everything is seen but the earth, and never forgot.
  
  This girl's desire drew me home, we also had wanted
  Too near our blood,
  And to tangle the interbranching net of generations
  With a knot sideways.
  
  Desire's the arrow-sprayer
  And shoots into the stars.
  
  Poor little Tamar
  He gave you a luckless name in memory of me
  And now he is old forgets mine.
  
  " "You are that Helen,"
  Said Tamar leaning over the fat shape
  The quiet and fleshless voice seemed issuing from,
  A sound of youth from the old puffed lips, "What Helen?
  
  This
  man's .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Sister, this body was saying?
  
  " "By as much more
  As you are of your brother.
  
  " "Why," laughed Tamar trembling,
  "Hundreds of nasty children do it, and we
  Nothing but children.
  
  " Then the old man: "Lies, lies, lies.
  
  No ghost, a lying old woman.
  
  Your Aunt Helen
  Died white as snow.
  
  She died before your mother died.
  
  Your mother and this old woman always hated her,
  This liar, as they hated me.
  
  I was too hard a nature
  To die of it, Lily and Stella.
  
  " "It makes me nothing,
  My darling sin a shadow and me a doll on wires,"
  Thought Tamar with one half her spirit; and the other half said,
  "Poor lies, words without meaning.
  
  Poor Aunt Stella,
  The voices in her have no minds.
  
  " "Poor little Tamar,"
  Murmured the young voice from the swollen cavern,
  "Though you are that woman's daughter, if we dead
  Could be sorrowful for anyone but ourselves
  I would be sorrowful for you, a trap so baited
  Was laid to catch you when the world began,
  Before the granite foundation.
  
  I too have tasted the sweet bait.
  
  But you are the luckier, no one came home to me
  To say there are no whips beyond death but only memory,
  And that can be endured.
  
  " The room was quiet a moment,
  And Tamar heard the wind moving outdoors.
  
  Then the idiot
  Jinny Cauldwell
  Whose mind had been from birth a crippled bird but when she
  was twelve years old her mind's cage
  Was covered utterly, like a bird-cage covered with its evening
  cloth when lamps are lighted,
  And her memory skipped the more than forty years between but
  caught stray gleams of the sun of childhood,
  She in her crumpled voice: "I'd rather play with Helen, go away
  Stella.
  
  Stella pinches me,
  Lily laughs at me, Lily and Stella are not my sisters.
  
  " "Jinny,
  Jinny,"
  Said the old man shaking like a thin brick house-wall in an earthquake,
  "do you remember, Jinny?
  
  "
  "Jinny don't like the old man," she answered, "give me the star,
  give me my star,"
  She whined, stretching from bed to reach the candle, "why have
  they taken my little star?
  
  Helen would give it to Jinny.
  
  " Then Stella waking from the
  trance sighed and arose to quiet her
  According to her night's habit.
  
  Tamar said, "You were screaming
  in your sleep.
  
  " "I had great visions.
  
  And I have forgotten them.
  
  There Jinny, there, there.
  
  It'll have
  the candle, will it?
  
  Pretty Jinny.
  
  Will have candle to-morrow.
  
  Little Jinny let Aunt Stella sleep
  now.
  
  " Old Cauldwell tottering
  Went to his room; then Tamar said, "You were talking about
  his sister Helen, my aunt Helen,
  You never told me about her.
  
  " "She has been dead for forty
  years, what should we tell you about her?
  
  Now little Jinny, pretty sister," And laying her hands upon the
  mattress of the bed
  The old woman cradled it up and down, humming a weary song.
  
  Tamar stood vainly waiting
  The sleep of the monstrous babe; at length because it would not
  sleep went to her room and heard it
  Gurgle and whimper an hour; and the tired litanies of the lullabies;
  not quiet till daylight.
  
  V
  O swiftness of the swallow and strength
  Of the stone shore, brave beauty of falcons,
  Beauty of the blue heron that flies
  Opposite the color of evening
  From the Carmel River's reed-grown mouth
  To her nest in the deep wood of the deer
  Cliffs of peninsular granite engirdle,
  beauty of the fountains of the sun
  1 pray you enter a little chamber,
  I have given you bodies, I have made you puppets,
  I have made idols for God to enter
  And tiny cells to hold your honey.
  
  I have given you a dotard and an idiot,
  An old woman puffed with vanity, youth but botched with incest,
  O blower of music through the crooked bugles,
  You that make signs of sins and choose the lame for angels,
  Enter and possess.
  
  Being light you have chosen the dark lamps,
  A hawk the sluggish bodies: therefore God you chose
  Me; and therefore I have made you idols like these idols
  To enter and possess.
  
  Tamar, finding no hope,
  Slid back on passion, she had sought counsel of the dead
  And found half-scornful pity and found her sin
  Fore-dated; there was honey at least in shame
  And secrecy in silence, and her lover
  Could meet her afield or slip to her room at night
  In serviceable safety.
  
  They learned, these two,
  Not to look back nor forward; and but for the hint
  Of vague and possible wreck every transgression
  Paints on the storm-edge of the sky, their blue
  Though it dulled a shade with custom shone serene
  To the fifth moon, when the moon's mark on women
  Died out of Tamar.
  
  She kept secret the warning,
  How could she color such love with perplexed fear?
  
  Her soul walked back and forth like a new prisoner
  Feeling the plant of unescapable fate
  Root in her body.
  
  There was death; who had entered water
  To compass love might enter again to escape
  Love's fruit; "But O, but O," she thought, "not to die now.
  
  It is less than half a year
  Since life turned sweet.
  
  If I knew one of the girls
  My lover has known
  She'd tell me what to do, how to be fruitless,
  How to be .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  happy?
  
  They do it, they do it, all sin
  Grew nothing to us that day in Mai Paso water.
  
  A love sterile and sacred as the stars.
  
  I will tell my lover, he will make me safe,
  He will find means .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Sterile and sacred, and more than any woman
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Unhappy.
  
  Miserable," she sobbed, "miserable,
  The rough and bitter water about the cliff's foot
  Better to breathe.
  
  "
  When Lee was not by her side
  She walke4 the cliffs to tempt them.
  
  The calm and large
  Pacific surge heavy with summer rolling southeast from a far origin
  Battered to foam among the stumps of granite below.
  
  Tamar watched it swing up the little fjords and fountain
  Not angrily in the blowholes; a gray vapor
  Breathed up among the buttressed writhings of the cypress trunks
  And branches swollen with blood-red lichen.
  
  She went home
  And her night was full of foolish dreams, two layers of dream,
  unrelative in emotion
  Or substance to the pain of her thoughts.
  
  One, the undercurrent
  layer that seemed all night continuous,
  Concerned the dead (and rather a vision than a dream, for visions
  gathered on that house
  Like corposant fire on the hoar mastheads of a ship wandering
  strange waters), brown-skinned families
  Came down the river and straggled through the wood to the sea,
  they kindled fires by knobs of granite
  And ate the sea-food that the plow still turns up rotting shells of,
  not only around Point Lobos
  But north and south wherever the earth breaks off to sea-rock;
  Tamar saw the huddled bodies
  Squat by the fires and sleep; but when the dawn came there was
  throbbing music meant for daylight
  And that weak people went where it led them and were nothing;
  then Spaniards, priests and horseback soldiers,
  Came down the river and wandered through the wood to the sea,
  and hearing the universal music
  Went where it led them and were nothing; and the English-speakers
  Came down the river and wandered through the wood to the sea,
  among them Tamar saw her mother
  Walking beside a nameless woman with no face nor breasts; and
  the universal music
  Led them away and they were nothing; but Tamar led her father
  from that flood and saved him,
  For someone named a church built on a rock, it was beautiful
  and white, not fallen to ruin
  Like the ruin by Carmel River; she led him to it and made him
  enter the door, when he had entered
  A new race came from the door and wandered down the river
  to the sea and to Point Lobos.
  
  This was the undertow of the dream, obscured by a brighter
  surface layer but seeming senseless.
  
  The tides of the sea were quiet and someone said "because the
  moon is lost.
  
  " Tamar looked up
  And the moon dwindled, rocketing off through lonely space, and
  the people in the moon would perish
  Of cold or of a star's fire: then Will Andrews curiously wounded
  in the face came saying
  "Tamar, don't cry.
  
  What do you care?
  
  I will take care of you.
  
  "
  Wakening, Tamar thought about him
  And how he had stopped coming to see her.
  
  Perhaps it was
  another man came through her dream,
  The wound in the face disguised him, but that morning Lee
  having ridden to Mill Creek
  To bargain about some fields of winter pasture
  Now that the advancing year withered the hill-grass,
  Tamar went down and saddled her own pony,
  A four-year-old, as white as foam, and cantered
  Past San Jose creek-mouth and the Carrows' farm
  (Where David Carrow and his fanatical blue eyes,
  That afterward saw Christ on the hill, smiled at her passing)
  And three miles up the Carmel Valley came
  To the Andrews place where the orchards ran to the river
  And all the air was rich with ripening apples.
  
  She would not go to the house; she did not find
  Whom she was seeking; at length sadly she turned
  Homeward, for Lee might be home within two hours,
  And on the Carmel bridge above the water
  (Shrunken with summer and shot with water lichen,
  The surface scaled with minute scarlet leaves,
  The borders green with slimy threads) met whom she sought.
  
  "Tamar," he said, "I've been to see you.
  
  " "You hadn't
  For a long time.
  
  " "I had some trouble with Lee,
  I thought you didn't want me.
  
  " While they talked
  Her eyes tasted his face: was it endurable?
  
  Though it lacked the curious gash her dream had given him.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "I didn't want you, you thought?
  
  " "Lee said so.
  
  " "You might
  have waited
  Till Tamar said so.
  
  " "Well," he answered, "I've been,
  And neither of you was home but now I've met you.
  
  "
  Well-looking enough; freckles, light hair, light eyes;
  Not tall, but with a chest and hard wide shoulders,
  And sitting the horse well "O I can do it, I can do it,
  Help me, God," murmured Tamar in her mind,
  "How else what else can I do?
  
  " and said, "Luck, isn't it?
  
  What did you want to see me about?
  
  " "I wanted .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Because I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  like you, Tamar.
  
  " "Why should I be careful,"
  She thought, "if I frighten him off what does it matter,
  I have got a little beyond caring.
  
  " "Let's go down
  Into the willow," she said, "we needn't be seen
  Talking and someone tell him and make trouble
  Here on the bridge.
  
  " They went to the hidden bank
  Under the deep green willows, colored water
  Stagnated on its moss up to the stems,
  Coarse herbage hid the stirrups, Tamar slid from the saddle
  As quietly as the long unwhitening wave
  Moulds a sunk rock, and while he tethered the horses,
  "I have been lonely," she said.
  
  "Not for me, Tamar.
  
  "
  "You think not?
  
  Will, now that all's over
  And likely we'll not see each other again
  Often, nor by ourselves, why shouldn't I tell you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  "What, Tamar?
  
  " "There've been moments .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  hours then .
  
  .
  
  When anything you might have asked me for
  Would have been given, I'd have done anything
  You asked me to, you never asked anything, Will.
  
  I'm telling you this so that you may remember me
  As one who had courage to speak truth, you'll meet
  So many others.
  
  " "But now" he meant to ask,
  "Now it's too late, Tamar?
  
  " and hadn't courage,
  And Tamar thought "Must I go farther and say more?
  
  Let him despise me as I despise myself.
  
  I have got a little beyond caring.
  
  " "Now?
  
  " she said.
  
  "Do you think I am changed?
  
  You have changed, Will,
  you have grown
  Older, and stronger I think, your face is firmer;
  And carefuller: I have not changed, I am still reckless
  To my own injury, and as trustful as a child.
  
  Would I be with you here in the green thicket
  If I weren't trustful?
  
  If you should harm me, Will,
  I'd think it was no harm.
  
  " She had laid her hand
  On the round sunburnt throat and felt it throbbing,
  And while she spoke the thought ran through her mind,
  "He is only a little boy but if he turns pale
  I have won perhaps, for white's the wanting color.
  
  If he reddens I’ve lost and it's no matter.
  
  " He did not move
  And seemed not to change color and Tamar said,
  "Now I must go.
  
  Lee will be home soon.
  
  How soft the ground is in the willow shadow.
  
  I have ended with you honestly, Will; remember me
  Not afraid to speak truth and not ashamed
  To have stripped my soul naked.
  
  You have seen all of me.
  
  Good-bye.
  
  " But when she turned he caught her by the arm,
  She sickened inward, thinking, "Now it has come.
  
  I have called and called it and I can't endure it.
  
  Ah.
  
  A dumb beast.
  
  " But he had found words now and said,
  "How would you feel, Tamar, if all of a sudden
  The bird or star you'd broken your heart to have
  Flew into your hands, then flew away.
  
  O Tamar, Tamar,
  You can't go now, you can't.
  
  " She unresisting
  Took the hot kisses on her neck and hair
  And hung loose in his arms the while he carried her
  To a clean bank of grass in the deep shadow.
  
  He laid her there and kneeling by her: "You said you trusted me.
  
  You are wise, Tamar; I love you so much too well
  I would cut my hands off not to harm you.
  
  " But she,
  Driven by the inward spark of life and dreading
  Its premature maturity, could not rest
  On harmless love, there were no hands to help
  In the innocence of love, and like a vision
  Came to her the memory of that other lover
  And how he had fallen a farther depth
  From firmer innocence at Mai Paso, but the stagnant
  Autumn water of Carmel stood too far
  From the April freshet in the hills.
  
  Tamar pushed off
  His kisses and stood up weeping and cried
  "It's no use, why will you love me till I cry?
  
  Lee hates you and my father is old and old, we can't
  Sour the three years he has before he dies.
  
  "
  "I'll wait for you," said the boy, "wait years, Tamar.
  
  " Then Tamar
  Hiding her face against his throat
  So that he felt the tears whispered, "But I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  She sobbed, "Have no patience .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I can't wait.
  
  Will .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  When I made my soul naked for you
  There was one spot .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  a fault .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  a shame
  I was ashamed to uncover.
  
  " She pressed her mouth
  Between the muscles of his breast: "I want you and want you.
  
  You didn't know that a clean girl could want a man.
  
  Now you will take me and use me and throw me away
  And I've .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  earned it.
  
  " "Tamar, I swear by God
  Never to let you be sorry, but protect you
  With all my life.
  
  " "This is our marriage," Tamar answered.
  
  "But God would have been good to me to have killed me
  Before I told you.
  
  " The boy feeling her body
  Vibrant and soft and sweet in its weeping surrender
  Went blind and could not feel how she hated him
  That moment; when he awakened she was lying
  With the auburn hair muddied and the white face
  Turned up to the willow leaves, her teeth were bared
  And sunk in the under lip, a smear of blood
  Reddening the corner of the lips.
  
  One of her arms
  Crushed both her breasts, the other lay in the grass,
  The fingers clutching toward the roots of the soft grass.
  
  "O Tamar,"
  Murmured the boy, "I love you, I love you.
  
  What shall I do?
  
  Go away?
  
  Kill myself, Tamar?
  
  " She contracted all her body and crouched
  in the long grass, thinking
  "That Helen of my old father's never fooled him at least," and
  said, "There is nothing to do, nothing.
  
  It is horribly finished.
  
  Keep it secret, keep it secret, Will.
  
  I too
  was to blame a little.
  
  But I didn't mean .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  this.
  
  " "I know," he said, "it was my
  fault, I would kill myself, Tamar,
  To undo it but I loved you so, Tamar.
  
  " "Loved?
  
  You have hurt
  me and broken me, the house is broken
  And any thief can enter it.
  
  " "O Tamar!" "You have broken
  our crystal innocence, we can never
  Look at each other freely again.
  
  " "What can I do, Tamar?
  
  "
  "Nothing.
  
  I don't know.
  
  Nothing.
  
  Never come to the farm to see me.
  
  " "Where can I see you,
  Tamar?
  
  " "Lee is always watching me,
  And I believe he'd kill us.
  
  Listen, Will.
  
  To-morrow night I'll
  put a lamp in my window,
  When all the house is quiet, and if you see it you can climb up
  by the cypress.
  
  I must go home,
  Lee will be home.
  
  Will, though you've done to me worse than
  I ever dreamed, I love you, you have my soul,
  I am your tame bird now.
  
  "
  VI
  This was the high plateau of summer and August waning; white
  vapors
  Breathed up no more from the brown fields nor hung in the hills;
  daily the insufferable sun
  Rose, naked light, and flaming naked through the pale transparent
  ways of the air drained gray
  The strengths of nature; all night the eastwind streamed out of
  the valley seaward, and the stars blazed.
  
  The year went up to its annual mountain of death, gilded with
  hateful sunlight, waiting rain.
  
  Stagnant waters decayed, the trickling springs that all the misty-hooded
  summer had fed
  Pendulous green under the granite ocean-cliffs dried and turned
  foul, the rock-flowers faded,
  And Tamar felt in her blood the filth and fever of the season.
  
  Walking beside the house-wall
  Under her window, she resented sickeningly the wounds in the
  cypress bark, where Andrews
  Climbed to his tryst, disgust at herself choked her, and as a fire
  by water
  Under the fog-bank of the night lines all the sea and sky with
  fire, so her self-hatred
  Reflecting itself abroad burned back against her, all the world
  growing hateful, both her lovers
  Hateful, but the intolerably masculine sun hatefullest of all.
  
  The heat of the season
  Multiplied centipedes, the black worms that breed under loose
  rock, they call them thousand-leggers,
  They invaded the house, their phalloid bodies cracking underfoot
  with a bad odor, and dropped
  Ceiling to pillow at night, a vile plague though not poisonous.
  
  Also the sweet and female sea
  Was weak with calm, one heard too clearly a mounting cormorant's
  wing-claps half a mile off shore;
  The hard and dry and masculine tyrannized for a season.
  
  Rain
  in October or November
  Yearly avenges the balance; Tamar's spirit rebelled too soon, the
  female fury abiding
  In so beautiful a house of flesh.
  
  She came to her aunt the ghost-seer.
  
  "Listen to me, Aunt Stella.
  
  I think I am going mad, I must talk to the dead; Aunt Stella,
  will you help me?
  
  " That old woman
  Was happy and proud, no one for years had sought her for
  her talent.
  
  "Dear Tamar, I will help you.
  
  We must go down into the darkness, Tamar, it is hard and painful
  for me.
  
  " "I am in the darkness
  Already, a fiery darkness.
  
  " "The good spirits will guide you,
  it is easy for you; for me, death.
  
  Death, Tamar, I have to die to reach them.
  
  " "Death's no bad
  thing," she answered, "each hour of the day
  Has more teeth.
  
  " "Are you so unhappy, Tamar, the good spirits
  will help you and teach you.
  
  " "Aunt Stella,
  To-night, to-night?
  
  " "I groan when I go down to death, your
  father and brother will come and spoil it.
  
  "
  "In the evening we will go under the rocks by the sea.
  
  " "Well,
  in the evening.
  
  " "If they talk to us
  I'll buy you black silk and white lace.
  
  "
  In and out of the little fjord swam the weak waves
  Moving their foam in the twilight.
  
  Tamar at one flank, old
  Stella at the other, upheld poor Jinny
  Among the jags of shattered granite, so they came to the shingle.
  
  Rich, damp and dark the sea's breath
  Folding them made amend for days of sun-sickness, but Jinny
  among the rubble granite
  (They had no choice but take her along with them, who else
  would care for the idiot?
  
  ) slipped, and falling
  Gashed knees and forehead, and she whimpered quietly in the
  darkness.
  
  "Here," said Tamar, "I made you
  A bed of seaweed under the nose of this old rock, let Jinny lie
  beside you, Aunt Stella,
  I’ll lay the rug over you both.
  
  " They lay on the odorous kelp,
  Tamar squatted beside them,
  The weak sea wavered in her rocks and Venus hung over the
  west between the cliff-butts
  Like the last angel of the world, the crystal night deepening.
  
  The sea and the three women
  Kept silence, only Tamar moved herself continually on the fret
  of her taut nerves,
  And the sea moved, on the obscure bed of her eternity, but
  both were voiceless.
  
  Tamar
  Felt her pulse bolt like a scared horse and stumble and stop,
  for it seemed to her a wandering power
  Essayed her body, something hard and rounded and invisible
  pressed itself for entrance
  Between the breasts, over the diaphragm.
  
  When she was forced
  backward and lay panting, the assault
  Failed, the presence withdrew, and in that clearance she heard
  her old Aunt Stella monotonously muttering
  Words with no meaning in them; but the tidal night under
  the cliff seemed full of persons
  With eyes, although there was no light but the evening planet's
  and her trail in the long water.
  
  Then came a man's voice from the woman, saying, "Que quieres
  pobrecita?
  
  " and Tamar, "Morir,"
  Trembling, and marveling that she lied for no reason, and said,
  "Es porque no entiendo,
  Anything but ingles.
  
  " To which he answered, "Ah pobrecita,"
  and was silent.
  
  And Tamar
  Cried, "I will talk to that Helen.
  
  " But instead another male throat
  spoke out of the woman's
  Unintelligible gutturals, and it ceased, and the woman changing
  voice, yet not to her own:
  "An Indian.
  
  He says his people feasted here and sang to their
  Gods and the tall Gods came walking
  Between the tide-marks on the rocks; he says to strip and dance
  and he will sing, and his Gods
  Come walking.
  
  " Tamar answered, crying, "I will not, I will
  not, tell him to go away and let me
  Talk to that Helen.
  
  " But old Stella after a silence: "He says No,
  no, the pregnant women
  Would always dance here and the shore belongs to his people's
  ghosts nor will they endure another
  Unless they are pleased.
  
  " And Tamar said, "I cannot dance,
  drive him away," but while she said it
  Her hands accepting alien life and a strange will undid the
  fastenings of her garments.
  
  She panted to control them, tears ran down her cheeks, the
  male voice chanted
  Hoarse discords from the old woman's body, Tamar drew her
  beauty
  Out of its husks; dwellers on eastern shores
  Watch moonrises as white as hers
  When the half-moon about midnight
  Steps out of her husk of water to dance in heaven:
  So Tamar weeping
  Slipped every sheath down to her feet, the spirit of the place
  Ruling her, she and the evening star sharing the darkness,
  And danced on the naked shore
  Where a pale couch of sand covered the rocks,
  Danced with slow steps and streaming hair,
  Dark and slender
  Against the pallid sea-gleam, slender and maidenly
  Dancing and weeping .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It seemed to her that all her body
  Was touched and troubled with polluting presences
  Invisible, and whatever had happened to her from her two lovers
  She had been until that hour inviolately a virgin,
  Whom now the desires of dead men and dead Gods and a dead
  tribe
  Used for their common prey .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  dancing and weeping,
  Slender and maidenly .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The chant was changed,
  And Tamar's body responded to the change, her spirit
  Wailing within her.
  
  She heard the brutal voice
  And hated it, she heard old Jinny mimic it
  In the cracked childish quaver, but all her body
  Obeyed it, wakening into wantonness,
  Kindling with lust and wilder
  Coarseness of insolent gestures,
  The senses cold and averse, but the frantic too-governable flesh
  Inviting the assaults of whatever desired it, of dead men
  Or Gods walking the tide-marks,
  The beautiful girlish body as gracile as a maiden's
  Gone beastlike, crouching and widening,
  Agape to be entered, as the earth
  Gapes with harsh heat-cracks, the inland adobe of sun-worn
  valleys
  At the end of summer
  Opening sick mouths for its hope of the rain,
  So her body gone mad
  Invited the spirits of the night, her belly and her breasts
  Twisting, her feet dashed with blood where the granite had
  bruised them,
  And she fell, and lay gasping on the sand, on the tide-line.
  
  Darkness
  Possessed the shore when the evening star was down; old Stella
  Was quiet in her trance; old Jinny the idiot clucked and parroted
  to herself, there was none but the idiot
  Saw whether a God or a troop of Gods came swaggering along
  the tide-marks unto Tamar, to use her
  Shamefully and return from her, gross and replete shadows,
  swaggering along the tide-marks
  Against the sea-gleam.
  
  After a little the life came back to that
  fallen flower; for fear or feebleness
  She crept on hands and knees, returning so to the old medium
  of this infamy.
  
  Only
  The new tide moved in the night now; Tamar with her back
  bent like a bow and the hair fallen forward
  Crouched naked at old Stella's feet, and shortly heard the voice
  she had cried for.
  
  "I am your Helen.
  
  I would have wished you choose another place to meet me and
  milder ceremonies to summon me.
  
  We dead have traded power for wisdom, yet it is hard for us
  to wait on the maniac living
  Patiently, the desires of you wild beasts.
  
  You have the power.
  
  "
  And Tamar murmured, "I had nothing,
  Desire nor power.
  
  " And Helen, "Humbler than you were.
  
  She
  has been humbled, my little Tamar.
  
  And not so clean as the first lover left you, Tamar.
  
  Another and
  half a dozen savages,
  Dead, and dressed up for Gods.
  
  " "I have endured it," she answered.
  
  Then the sweet disdainful voice
  In the throat of the old woman: "As for me, I chose rather to
  die.
  
  " "How can I kill
  A dead woman," said Tamar in her heart, not moving the lips,
  but the other listened to thought
  And answered, "O, we are safe, we shan't fear murder.
  
  But,
  Tamar, the child will die, and all for nothing
  You were submissive by the river, and lived, and endured fouling.
  
  I have heard the wiser flights
  Of better spirits, that beat up to the breasts and shoulders of our
  Father above the star-fire,
  Say, 'Sin never buys anything.
  
  '
  Tamar, kneeling, drew the
  thickness of her draggled hair
  Over her face and wept till it seemed heavy with blood; and
  like a snake lifting its head
  Out of a fire, she lifted up her face after a little and said, "It
  will live, and my father's
  Bitch be proved a liar.
  
  " And the voice answered, and the tone
  of the voice smiled, "Her words
  Rhyme with her dancing.
  
  Tamar, did you know there were
  many of us to watch the dance you danced there,
  And the end of the dance?
  
  We on the cliff; your mother, who
  used to hate me, was among us, Tamar.
  
  But she and I loved each only one man, though it were the
  same.
  
  We two shared one?
  
  You, Tamar,
  Are shared by many.
  
  " And Tamar: "This is your help, I dug
  down to you secret dead people
  To help me and so I am helped now.
  
  What shall I ask more?
  
  How it feels when the last liquid morsel
  Slides from the bone?
  
  Or whether you see the worm that burrows
  up through the eye-socket, or thrill
  To the maggot's music in the tube of a dead ear?
  
  You stinking
  dead.
  
  That you have no shame
  Is nothing: I have no shame: see I am naked, and if my thighs
  were wet with dead beasts' drippings
  I have suffered no pollution like the worms in yours; and if I
  cannot touch you I tell you
  There are those I can touch.
  
  I have smelled fire and tasted fire,
  And all these days of horrible sunlight, fire
  Hummed in my ears, I have worn fire about me like a cloak and
  burning for clothing.
  
  It is God
  Who is tired of the house that thousand-leggers crawl about in,
  where an idiot sleeps beside a ghost-seer,
  A doting old man sleeps with dead women and does not know it,
  And pointed bones are at the doors
  Or climb up trees to the window.
  
  I say He has gathered
  Fire all about the walls and no one sees it
  But I, the old roof is ripe and the rafters
  Rotten for burning, and all the woods are nests of horrible things,
  nothing would ever clean them
  But fire, but I will go to a clean home by the good river.
  
  " "You
  danced, Tamar," replied
  The sweet disdainful voice in the mouth of the old woman, "and
  now your song is like your dance,
  Modest and sweet.
  
  Only you have not said it was you,
  Before you came down by the sea to dance,
  That lit a candle in your closet and laid
  Paper at the foot of the candle.
  
  We were watching.
  
  And now the wick is nearly down to the heap,
  It's God will have fired the house?
  
  But Tamar,
  It will not burn.
  
  You will have fired it, your brother
  Will quench it, I think that God would hardly touch
  Anything in that house.
  
  " "If you know everything,"
  Cried Tamar, "tell me where to go.
  
  Now life won't do me and death is shut against me
  Because I hate you.
  
  O believe me I hate you dead people
  More than you dead hate me.
  
  Listen to me, Helen.
  
  There is no voice as horrible to me as yours,
  And the breasts the worms have worked in.
  
  A vicious berry
  Grown up out of the graveyard for my poison.
  
  But there is no one in the world as lonely as I,
  Betrayed by life and death.
  
  " Like rain breaking a storm
  Sobs broke her voice.
  
  Holding by a jag of the cliff
  She drew herself full height.
  
  God who makes beauty
  Disdains no creature, nor despised that wounded
  Tired and betrayed body.
  
  She in the starlight
  And little noises of the rising tide
  Naked and not ashamed bore a third part
  With the ocean and keen stars in the consistence
  And dignity of the world.
  
  She was white stone,
  Passion and despair and grief had stripped away
  Whatever is rounded and approachable
  In the body of woman, hers looked hard, long lines
  Narrowing down from the shoulder-bones, no appeal,
  A weapon and no sheath, fire without fuel,
  Saying, "Have you anything more inside you
  Old fat and sleepy sepulcher, any more voices?
  
  You can do better than my father's by-play
  And the dirty tricks of savages, decenter people
  Have died surely.
  
  T have so passed nature
  That God himself, who's dead or all these devils
  Would never have broken hell, might speak out of you
  Last season thunder and not scare me.
  
  " Old Stella
  Groaned but not spoke, old Jinny lying beside her
  Wakened at the word thunder and suddenly chuckling
  Began to mimic a storm, "whoo-whoo" for wind
  And "boom-boom-boom" for thunder.
  
  Other voices
  Wakened far off above the cliff, and suddenly
  The farm-bell ringing fire; and on the rock-islets
  Sleepy cormorants cried at it.
  
  "Why, now He speaks
  Another way than out of the fat throat,"
  Cried Tamar, and prayed, "O strong and clean and terrible
  Spirit and not father punish the hateful house.
  
  Fire eat the walls and roofs, drive the red beast
  Through every wormhole of the rotting timbers
  And into the woods and into the stable, show them,
  These liars, that you are alive.
  
  " Across her voice
  The bell sounded and old Jinny mimicking it,
  And shouts above the cliff.
  
  "Look, Jinny, look,"
  Cried Tamar, "the sky'd be red soon, come and we'll dress
  And watch the bonfire.
  
  " Yet she glanced no thought
  At her own mermaid nakedness but gathering
  The long black serpents of beached seaweed wove
  Wreaths for old Jinny and crowned and wound her.
  
  Meanwhile
  The bell ceased ringing and Stella ceased her moan,
  And in the sudden quietness, "Tamar," she said
  In the known voice of Helen so many years
  Dead, "though you hate me utterly, Tamar, I
  Have nothing to give back, I was quite emptied
  Of hate and love and the other fires of the flesh
  Before your mother gave the clay to my lover
  To mould you a vessel to hold them.
  
  " Tamar, winding
  Her mindless puppet in the sea-slough mesh
  Said over her shoulder, hardly turning, "Why then
  Do you trouble whom you don't hate?
  
  " "Because we hunger
  And hunger for life," she answered.
  
  "Did I come uncalled?
  
  You called me, you have more hot and blind, wild-blooded
  And passionate life than any other creature.
  
  How could I ever leave you while the life lasts?
  
  God pity us both, a cataract life
  Dashing itself to pieces in an instant.
  
  You are my happiness, you are my happiness and death eats you.
  
  I'll leave you when you are empty and cold and join us.
  
  Then pity me, then Tamar, me flitting
  The chilly and brittle pumice-tips of the moon,
  While the second death
  Corrodes this shell of me, till it makes my end.
  
  "
  But Tamar would not listen to her, too busily
  Decking old Jinny for the festival fire,
  And sighing that thin and envious ghost forsook
  Her instrument, and about that time harsh pain
  Wrung Tamar's loins and belly, and pain and terror
  Expelled her passionate fancies, she cried anxiously,
  "Stella, Aunt Stella, help me, will you?
  
  " and thinking,
  "She hears when Jinny whimpers," twistingly pinched
  Her puppet's arm until it screamed.
  
  Old Stella
  Sat up on the seaweed bed and turned white eyes
  No pupils broke the diffused star-gleam in
  Upon her sixty-year-old babe, that now
  Crouched whimpering, huddled under the slippery leaves
  And black whips of the beach; and by it stood gleaming
  Tamar, anguished, all white as the blank balls
  That swept her with no sight but vision: old Stella
  Did not awake yet but a voice blew through her,
  Not personal like the other, and shook her body
  And shook her hands: "It was no good to do too soon, your
  fire's out, you'd been patient for me
  It might have saved two fires.
  
  " But Tamar: "Stella.
  
  I'm dying: or it is dying: wake up Aunt Stella.
  
  O pain, pain, help me.
  
  " And the voice: "She is mine while I
  use her.
  
  Scream, no one will hear but this one
  Who has no mind, who has not more help than July rain.
  
  " And
  Tamar, "What are you, what are you, mocking me?
  
  More dirt and another dead man?
  
  O," she moaned, pressing her
  flanks with both her hands, and bending
  So that her hair across her knees lay on the rock.
  
  It answered,
  "Not a voice from carrion.
  
  Breaker of trees and father of grass, shepherd of clouds and
  waters, if you had waited for me
  You'd be the luckier.
  
  " "What shall I give you?
  
  " Tamar cried,
  "I have given away"
  Pain stopped her, and then
  Blood ran, and she fell down on the round stones, and felt nor
  saw nothing.
  
  A little later
  Old Stella Moreland woke out of her vision, sick and shaking.
  
  Tamar's mind and suffering
  Returned to her neither on the sea-rocks of the midnight nor
  in her own room; but she was lying
  Where Lee her brother had lain, nine months before, after his
  fall, in the big westward bedroom.
  
  She lay on the bed, and in one corner was a cot for Stella who
  nursed her, and in the other
  A cot for the idiot, whom none else would care for but old
  Stella.
  
  After the ache of awakening
  And blank dismay of the spirit come home to a spoiled house,
  she lay thinking with vacant wonder
  That life is always an old story, repeating itself always like the
  leaves of a tree
  Or the lips of an idiot; that herself like Lee her brother
  Was picked up bleeding from the sea-boulders under the sea-cliff
  and carried up to be laid
  In the big westward bedroom .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  was he also fouled with
  ghosts before they found him, a gang
  Of dead men beating him with rotten bones, mouthing his body,
  piercing him?
  
  "Stella," she whispered,
  "Have I been sick long?
  
  " "There, sweetheart, lie still; three or
  four days.
  
  " "Has Lee been in to see me?
  
  "
  "Indeed he has, hours every day.
  
  " "He'll come, then," and she
  closed her eyes and seemed to sleep.
  
  Someone tapped at the door after an hour and Tamar said,
  "Come, Lee.
  
  " But her old father
  Came in, and he said nothing, but sat down by the bed; Tamar
  had closed her eyes.
  
  In a little
  Lee entered, and he brought a chair across the room and sat by
  the bed.
  
  "Why don't you speak,
  Lee?
  
  " And he said, "What can I say except I love you, sister?
  
  "
  "Why do you call me sister,
  Not Tamar?
  
  " And he answered, "I love you, Tamar.
  
  " Then old
  Aunt Stella said, "See, she's much better.
  
  But you must let her rest.
  
  She'll be well in a few days; now kiss
  her, Lee, and let her rest.
  
  "
  Lee bent above the white pure cameo-face on the white pillow,
  meaning to kiss the forehead.
  
  But Tamar's hands caught him, her lips reached up for his: while
  Jinny the idiot clapped and chuckled
  And made a clucking noise of kisses; then, while Lee sought to
  untwine the arms that yoked his neck,
  The old man, rising: "I opened the Book last night thinking
  about the sorrows of this house,
  And it said, 'If a man find her in the field and force her and lie
  with her, nevertheless the damsel
  Has not earned death, for she cried out and there was none to
  save her.
  
  ' Be glad, Tamar, my sins
  Are only visited on my son, for you there is mercy.
  
  " "David,
  David,
  Will you be gone and let her rest now," cried old Stella, "do
  you mean to kill her with a bible?
  
  "
  "Woman," he answered, "has God anything to do with you?
  
  She will not die, the Book
  Opened and said it.
  
  " Tamar, panting, leaned against the pillow
  and said, "Go, go.
  
  To-morrow
  Say all you please; what does it matter?
  
  " And the old man said,
  "Come, Lee, in the morning she will hear us.
  
  "
  Tamar stretched out her trembling hand, Lee did not touch it,
  but went out ahead of his father.
  
  So they were heard in the hall, and then their footsteps on the
  stair.
  
  Tamar lay quiet and rigid,
  With open eyes and tightening fists, with anger like a coiled steel
  spring in her throat but weakness
  And pain for the lead weights.
  
  After an hour she said, "What
  does he mean to do?
  
  Go away?
  
  Kill himself, Stella?
  
  " Stella answered, "Nothing, nothing, they
  talk, it's to keep David quiet.
  
  Your father is off his head a little, you know.
  
  Now rest you,
  little Tamar, smile and be sleepy,
  Scold them to-morrow.
  
  " "Shut the sun out of my eyes then,"
  Tamar said, but the idiot Jinny
  Made such a moaning when the windows were all curtained they
  needed to let in one beam
  For dust to dance in; then the idiot and the sick girl slept.
  
  About
  the hour of sundown
  Tamar was dreaming trivially an axman chopping down a tree
  and field-mice scampering
  Out of the roots when suddenly like a shift of wind the dream
  Changed and grew awful, she watched dark horsemen coming
  out of the south, squadrons of hurrying horsemen
  Between the hills and the dark sea, helmeted like the soldiers of
  the war in France,
  Carrying torches.
  
  When they passed Mal Paso Creek the columns
  Veered, one of the riders said, "Here it began," but another
  answered, "No.
  
  Before the granite
  Was bedded to build the world on.
  
  " So they formed and galloped
  north again, hurrying squadrons,
  And Tamar thought, "When they come to the Carmel River
  then it will happen.
  
  They have passed Mal Paso.
  
  "
  Meanwhile
  Who has ever guessed to what odd ports, what sea buoying the
  keels, a passion blows its bulkless
  Navies of vision?
  
  High up in the hills
  Ramon Ramirez, who was herdsman of the Cauldwell herds,
  stood in his cabin doorway
  Rolling a cigarette a half-hour after sundown, and he felt puffs
  from the south
  Come down the slope of stunted redwoods, so he thought the
  year was turning at last, and shortly
  There would come showers; he walked therefore a hundred
  yards to westward, where a point of the hill
  Stood over Wildcat Canyon and the sea was visible; he saw
  Point Lobos gemmed in the darkening
  Pale yellow sea; and on the point the barn-roofs and the house roof
  breaking up through the blackness
  Of twilight cypress tops, and over the sea a cloud forming.
  
  The
  evening darkened.
  
  Southwestward
  A half-mile loop of the coast-road could be seen, this side Mal
  Paso.
  
  Suddenly a nebular company
  Of lights rounded the hill, Ramirez thought the headlights of
  a car sweeping the road,
  But in a moment saw that it was horsemen, each carrying a light,
  hurrying northward,
  Moving in squads he judged of twenty or twenty-five, he counted
  twelve or thirteen companies
  When the brush broke behind him and a horseman rode the
  headlong ridge like level ground,
  Helmeted, carrying a torch.
  
  Followed a squad of twelve, helmeted,
  cantering the headlong ridge
  Like level ground.
  
  He thought in the nervous innocence of the
  early war, they must be Germans.
  
  Tamar awoke out of her dream and heard old Jinny saying,
  "Dear sister Helen, kiss me
  As you kiss David.
  
  I was watching under a rock, he took your
  clothes off and you kissed him
  So hard and hard, I love you too, Helen; you hardly ever kiss
  me.
  
  " Tamar lay rigid,
  Breathless to listen to her; it was well known in the house that
  under the shell of imbecility
  Speech and a spirit, however subdued, existed still; there were
  waking flashes, and more often
  She talked in sleep and proved her dreams were made out of
  clear memories, childhood sights and girlhood
  Fancies, before the shadow had fallen; so Tamar craving food
  for passion listened to her,
  And heard: "Why are you cross, Helen?
  
  I won't peek if you'd
  rather I didn't.
  
  Darling Helen,
  I love him, too; I'd let him play with me the way he does with
  you if he wanted to.
  
  And Lily and Stella hate me as much as they hate you.
  
  " All
  she said after was so mumbled
  That Tamar could not hear it, could only hear the mumble, and
  old Aunt Stella's nasal sleep
  And the sea murmuring.
  
  When the mumbled voice was quiet it
  seemed to Tamar
  A strange thing was preparing, an inward pressure
  Grew in her throat and seemed to swell her arms and hands
  And join itself with a fluid power
  Streaming from somewhere in the room from Jinny?
  
  From Stella?
  
  and in a moment the heavy chair
  That Lee had sat in, tipped up, rose from the floor,
  And floated to the place he had brought it from
  Five hours ago.
  
  The power was then relaxed,
  And Tamar could breathe and speak.
  
  She awaked old Stella
  And trembling told her what she had seen; who laughed
  And answered vaguely so that Tamar wondered
  Whether she was still asleep, and let her burrow
  In her bed again and sleep.
  
  Later that night
  Tamar too slept, but shudderingly, in snatches,
  For fear of dreaming.
  
  A night like years.
  
  In the gray of morning
  A horse screamed from the stableyard and Tamar
  Heard the thud of hooves lashing out and timbers
  Splintering, and two or three horses broken loose
  Galloped about the grounds of the house.
  
  She heard men calling,
  And downstairs Lee in a loud angry tone
  Saying "Someone's pitched the saw-buck and the woodpile
  Into the horse-corral.
  
  " Then Tamar thought
  "The same power moved his chair in the room, my hatred, my
  hatred,
  Disturbing the house because I failed to burn it.
  
  I must be quiet and quiet and quiet and keep
  The serving spirits of my hid hatred quiet
  Until my rime serves too.
  
  Helen you shadow
  Were never served so handily.
  
  " Stella had awakened,
  And Tamar asking for a drink of water
  She waddled to fetch it and met Lee at the door.
  
  "O Lee," she said, "that noise what ever has happened?
  
  "
  He: "I don't know.
  
  Some fool has pitched the whole woodpile
  Into the horse-corral.
  
  Is Tamar awake?
  
  I want to see Tamar.
  
  " He entered the room
  As Stella left it.
  
  Old withered Aunt Jinny
  Sat up in her bed saying "David, David," but Lee
  Kneeling at Tamar's bedside, "O Tamar, Tamar.
  
  The old man's outdoors tottering after the horses
  So I can see you a minute.
  
  O why, why, why,
  Didn't you tell me Tamar?
  
  I'd have taken you up
  In my arms and carried you to the end of the world.
  
  "
  "How it's turned sour," she thought, "I'd have been glad of this
  Yesterday," and she clinched her finger-nails
  Into her palms under the bed-covers,
  Saying, "Tell you what?
  
  What have they told you," she asked
  With a white sidelong smile, "people are always lying?
  
  "
  "Tamar, that you that we .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  O I've lived hell
  Four or five days now.
  
  " "You look well enough,"
  She answered, "put yours by mine," laying her white, lean,
  And somewhat twitching hand on the counterpane,
  "Mine used to manage a bridle as well as yours
  And now look at them.
  
  I don't suppose you want me
  Now, but it doesn't matter.
  
  You used to come to my bed
  With something else than pity, convenient, wasn't it?
  
  Not having to ride to Monterey?
  
  " He answered frowning,
  "However much you hurt me I am very glad too
  That all the joys and memories of a love
  As great and as forbidden as ours are nothing to you
  Or worse than nothing, because I have to go away,
  Two days from now, and stay rill the war's over
  And you are married and father is dead.
  
  I've promised him
  Never to see him again, never to see his face.
  
  He didn't ask it because he thinks his Book
  Told him I'm to be killed.
  
  That's foolishness,
  But makes your peace with him and thank God for that.
  
  What his Book told him.
  
  " "So here's the secret
  I wasn't strong enough yesterday to hear.
  
  I thought maybe you meant to kill yourself.
  
  "
  "Thanks, Tamar.
  
  The old man thinks I don't need to.
  
  " "O,
  You beast," she said, "you runaway dog.
  
  I wish you joy of your dirty Frenchwomen
  You want instead of me.
  
  Take it, take it.
  
  Old people in their dotage gabble the truth,
  You won't live long.
  
  " "What can I say, Tamar?
  
  I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
  
  " "But go away,"
  She said, "and if you'll come again to-night
  Maybe I'll tell you mine, my secret.
  
  "
  That morning
  Ramon Ramirez who watched the Cauldwell cattle
  Up in the hills kept thinking of his vision
  Of helmets carrying torches; he looked for tracks
  On the ridge where he had seen the riders cantering,
  And not a bush was broken, not a hoof-mark
  Scarred the sear grass.
  
  At noon he thought he'd ride
  To Vogel's place taking his lunch in the saddle
  And tell someone about it.
  
  At the gap in the hill
  Where storm-killed redwoods line both sides he met
  Johnny Cabrera with a flaming bundle
  Of dead twigs and dry grass tied with brown cord.
  
  He smelled the smoke and saw the flame sag over
  On a little wind from the east, and said in Spanish
  "Eh Johnny, are you out of matches?
  
  " who answered flashing
  His white teeth in a smile, "I'm carrying fire to Lobos
  If God is willing," and walked swinging ahead,
  Singing to himself the fool south-border couplet
  "No tengo tabaco, no tengo papel,
  No tengo dinero, God damn it to hell,"
  And Ramon called "Hey Johnny," but he would not stop
  Nor answer, and thinking life goes wild at times
  Ramon came to the hill-slope under Vogel's
  And smelled new smoke and saw the clouds go up
  And this same Johnny with two other men
  Firing the brush to make spring pasture.
  
  Ramon
  Felt the scalp tighten on his temples and thought best
  Not to speak word of either one of his visions,
  Though he talked with the men, they told him Tamar Cauldwell
  Was sick, and Lee had enlisted.
  
  The afternoon
  Was feverish for so temperate a sea-coast
  And terribly full of light, the sea like a hard mirror
  Reverberated the straight and shining serpents
  That fell from heaven and Tamar dreamed in a doze
  She was hung naked by that tight cloth bandage
  Half-way between sea and sky, beaten on by both,
  Burning with light; wakening she found she had tumbled
  The bed-clothes to the floor and torn her nightgown
  To rags, and was alone in the room, and blinded
  By the great glare of sun in the western windows.
  
  She rose and shut the curtains though they had told her
  She mustn't get out of bed, and finding herself
  Able to walk she stood by the little window
  That looked southeast from the south bay of the room
  And saw the smoke of burning brushwood slopes
  Tower up out of the hills in the windless weather
  Like an enormous pinetree, "Everybody
  But me has luck with fire," she thought to herself,
  "But I can walk now," and returned to bed
  And drew the sheets over her flanks, but leaving
  The breasts and the shoulders bare.
  
  In half an hour
  Stella and old Jinny came into the room
  With the old man David Cauldwell.
  
  Stella hastily
  Drew up the sheet to Tamar's throat but Tamar
  Saying, "You left the curtains open and the sun
  Has nearly killed me," doubled it down again,
  And David Cauldwell, trembling: "Will you attempt
  Age and the very grave, uncovering your body
  To move the old bones that seventy years have broken
  And dance your bosoms at me through a mist of death?
  
  Though I know that you and your brother have utterly despised
  The bonds of blood, and daughter and father are no closer
  bound,
  And though this house spits out all goodness, I am old, I am old,
  I am old,
  What do you want of me?
  
  " He stood tottering and wept,
  Covering his eyes and beard with shaken old hands,
  And Tamar, having not moved, "Nothing," she said,
  "Nothing, old man.
  
  I have swum too deep into the mud
  For this to sicken me; and as you say, there are neither
  Brother nor sister, daughter nor father, nor any love
  This side the doorways of the damnable house.
  
  But I have a wildbeast of a secret hidden
  Under the uncovered breast will eat us all up
  Before Lee goes.
  
  " "It is a lie, it is a lie, it is all a lie.
  
  Stella you must go out, go out of the room Stella,
  Not to hear the sick and horrible imaginations
  A sick girl makes for herself.
  
  Go Stella.
  
  " "Indeed I won't,
  David.
  
  " "You-you-it is still my house.
  
  " "To let you kill her
  with bad words
  All out of the bible-indeed I won't.
  
  " "Go, Stella," said Tamar,
  "Let me talk to this old man, and see who has suffered
  When you come back.
  
  I am out of pity, and you and Jinny
  Will be less scorched on the other side of the door.
  
  " After a
  third refusal
  The old woman went, leading her charge, and Tamar: "You
  thought it was your house?
  
  It is me they obey.
  
  It is mine, I shall destroy it.
  
  Poor old man I have earned
  authority.
  
  " "You have gone mad," he answered.
  
  And she: "I'll show you our trouble, you sinned, your old book
  calls it, and repented: that was foolish.
  
  I was unluckier, I had no chance to repent, so I learned something,
  we must keep sin pure
  Or it will poison us, the grain of goodness in a sin is poison.
  
  Old man, you have no conception
  Of the freedom of purity.
  
  Lock the door, old man, I am telling
  you a secret.
  
  " But he trembling,
  "O God thou hast judged her guiltless, the Book of thy word
  spake it, thou hast the life of the young man
  My son .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " and Tamar said, "Tell God we have revoked
  relationship in the house, he is not
  Your son nor you my father.
  
  " "Dear God, blot out her words,
  she has gone mad.
  
  Tamar, I will lock it,
  Lest anyone should come and hear you, and I will wrestle for
  you with God, I will not go out
  Until you are His.
  
  " He went and turned the key and Tamar
  said, "I told you I have authority.
  
  You obey me like the others, we pure have power.
  
  Perhaps
  there are other way, but I was plunged
  In the dirt of the world to win it, and, O father, so I will call
  you this last time, dear father
  You cannot think what freedom and what pleasure live in having
  abjured laws, in having
  Annulled hope, I am now at peace.
  
  " "There is no peace, there
  is none, there is none, there is no peace
  But His," he stammered, "but God's.
  
  " "Not in my arms, old
  man, on these two little pillows?
  
  Your son
  Found it there, and another, and dead men have defiled me.
  
  You that are half dead and half living,
  Look, poor old man.
  
  That Helen of yours, when you were
  young, where was her body more desirable,
  Or was she lovinger than I?
  
  You know it is forty years ago
  that we revoked
  Relationships in the house.
  
  " "He never forgives, He never forgives,
  evil punishes evil
  With the horrible mockery of an echo.
  
  " "Is the echo louder
  than the voice, I have surpassed her,
  Yours was the echo, time stands still old man, you'll learn when
  you have lived at the muddy root
  Under the rock of things; all times are now, to-day plays on
  last year and the inch of our future
  Made the first morning of the world.
  
  You named me for the
  monument in a desolate graveyard,
  Fool, and I say you were deceived, it was out of me that fire lit
  you and your Helen, your body
  Joined with your sister's
  Only because I was to be named Tamar and to love my brother
  and my father.
  
  I am the fountain.
  
  " But he, shuddering, moaned, "You have gone
  mad, you have gone mad, Tamar,"
  And twisted his old hands muttering, "I fear hell.
  
  O Tamar, the
  nights I have spent in agony,
  Ages of pain, when the eastwind ran like glass under the peeping
  stars or the southwest wind
  Plowed in the blackness of the tree.
  
  You-a little thing has
  driven you mad, a moment of suffering,
  But I for more than forty years have lain under the mountains
  and looked down into hell.
  
  "
  "One word," she said, "that was not written in the book of my
  fears.
  
  I did indeed fear pain
  Before peace found me, or death, never that dream.
  
  Old man,
  to be afraid is the only hell
  And dead people are quit of it, I have talked with the dead.
  
  "
  "Have you with her?
  
  " "Your pitiful Helen?
  
  She is always all about me; if you lay in my arms old man you
  would be with her.
  
  Look at me,
  Have you forgotten your Helen?
  
  " He in torture
  Groaned like a beast, but when he approached the bed she
  laughed, "Not here, behind you.
  
  " And he blindly
  Clutching at her, she left the coverlet in his hands and slipping
  free at the other side
  Saw in a mirror on the wall her own bright throat and shoulder
  and just beyond them the haggard
  Open-mouthed mask, the irreverend beard and blind red eyes.
  
  She caught the mirror from its fastening
  And held it to him, reverse.
  
  "Here is her picture, Helen's picture,
  look at her, why is she always
  Crying and crying?
  
  " When he turned the frame and looked,
  then Tamar: "See that is her lover's.
  
  The hairy and horrible lips to kiss her, the drizzling eyes to eat
  her beauty, happiest of women
  If only he were faithful; he is too young and wild and lovely,
  and the lusts of his youth
  Lead him to paw strange beds.
  
  " The old man turned the glass
  and gazed at the blank side, and turned it
  Again face toward him, he seemed drinking all the vision in it,
  and Tamar: "Helen, Helen,
  I know you are here present; was I humbled in the night lately
  and you exulted?
  
  See here your lover.
  
  I think my mother will not envy you now,
  your lover, Helen, your lover,
  The mouth to kiss you, the hands to fondle secret places.
  
  " Then
  the old man sobbing, "It is not easy
  To be old, mocked, and a fool.
  
  " And Tamar, "What, not yet,
  you have not gone mad yet?
  
  Look, old fellow.
  
  These rags drop off, the bandages hid something but I'm done
  with them.
  
  See .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I am the fire
  Burning the house.
  
  " "What do you want, what do you want?
  
  "
  he said, and stumbled toward her, weeping.
  
  "Only to strangle a ghost and to destroy the house.
  
  Spit on the
  memory of that Helen
  You might have anything of me.
  
  " And he groaning, "When I
  was young
  I thought it was my fault, I am old and know it was hers, night
  after night, night after night
  I have lain in the dark, Tamar, and cursed her.
  
  " "And now?
  
  "
  "I hate her, Tamar.
  
  " "O," said Tamar gently,
  "It is enough, she has heard you.
  
  Now unlock the door, old
  father, and go, and go.
  
  " "Your promise,
  Tamar, the promise, Tamar.
  
  " "Why I might do it, I have no
  feeling of revolt against it.
  
  Though you have forgotten that fear of hell why should I let
  you
  Be mocked by God?
  
  " And he, the stumpage of his teeth knocking
  together, "You think, you think
  I'll go to the stables and a rope from a rafter
  Finish it for you?
  
  " "Dear, I am still sick," she answered, "you
  don't want to kill me?
  
  A man
  Can wait three days: men have lived years and years on the
  mere hope.
  
  "
  Meanwhile the two old women
  Sat in their room, old Stella sat at the window looking south
  into the cypress boughs, and Jinny
  On her bed's edge, rocking her little withered body backward
  and forward, and said vacantly,
  "Helen, what do you do the times you lock the door to be
  alone, and Lily and Stella
  Wonder where David's ridden to?
  
  " After a while she said again,
  "Do tell me, sister Helen,
  What you are doing the times you lock the door to be alone,
  and Lily and Stella wonder
  Where David's ridden to?
  
  " And a third time she repeated,
  "Darling sister Helen, tell me
  What you are doing the times you lock the door to be alone,
  and Lily and Stella wonder
  Where David's riding?
  
  " Stella seemed to awake, catching at
  breath, and not in her own voice,
  "What does she mean," she said, "my picture, picture?
  
  O! the
  mirror I read in a book Jinny.
  
  A story about lovers; I never had a lover, I read about them;
  I won't look, though.
  
  With all that blind abundance, so much of life and blood, that
  sweet and warming blaze of passion,
  She has also a monkey in her mind.
  
  " "Tell me the story about
  the picture.
  
  " "Ugh, if she plans
  To humble herself utterly .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You may peek, Jinny,
  Try if you can, shut both eyes, draw them back into your forehead,
  and look, look, look
  Over the eyebrows, no, like this, higher up, up where the hair
  grows, now peek Jinny.
  
  Can't you
  See through the walls?
  
  You can.
  
  Look, look, Jinny.
  
  As if they'd
  cut a window.
  
  I used to tell you
  That God could see into caves: you are like God now: peek,
  Jinny.
  
  " "I can see something.
  
  It's in the stable, David's come from Monterey, he's hanging
  the saddle on a peg there .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  "Jinny, I shall be angry.
  
  That's not David,
  It's Lee, don't look into the stable, look into the bedroom, you
  know, Jinny, the bedroom,
  Where we left Tamar on the bed.
  
  " "O that's too near, it hurts
  me, it hurts my head, don't scold me, Helen.
  
  How can I see if I'm crying?
  
  I see now clearly.
  
  "
  "What do you see?
  
  " "I see through walls, O, I'm like God,
  Helen.
  
  I see the wood and plaster
  And see right through them.
  
  " "What?
  
  What are they doing?
  
  "
  "How can you be there and here, too, Helen?
  
  "
  "It's Tamar, what is she doing?
  
  " "I know it's you Helen, because
  you have no hair
  Under the arms, I see the blue veins under the arms.
  
  " "Well, if
  it's me, what is she doing?
  
  Is she on the bed?
  
  What is she saying?
  
  " "She is on fire Helen,
  she has white fire all around you
  Instead of clothes, and that is why you are laughing with so
  pale a face.
  
  " "Does she let him do
  Whatever he wants to, Jinny?
  
  " "He says that he hates .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  somebody .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and then you laughed for he had a rope
  Around his throat a moment, the beard stuck out over it.
  
  " "O
  Jinny it wasn't I that laughed
  It was that Tamar, Tamar, Tamar, she has bought him for
  nothing.
  
  She and her mother both to have him,
  The old hollow fool.
  
  " "What do they want him for, Helen?
  
  "
  "To plug a chink, to plug a chink, Jinny,
  In the horrible vanity of women.
  
  Lee's come home, now I
  could punish her, she's past hurting,
  Are they huddled together Jinny?
  
  What, not yet, not yet?
  
  "
  "You asked for the key but when he held it
  You ran away from him.
  
  " "What do I want, what do I want,
  it is frightful to be dead, what do I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Without power, and no body or face.
  
  To kill her, kill her?
  
  There's no hell and curse God for it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  Lee Cauldwell childishly
  Loved hearing the spurs jingle, and because he felt
  "After to-morrow I shan't wear them again,
  Nor straddle a pony for many a weary month and year,
  Maybe forever," he left them at his heels
  When he drew off the chaps and hung the saddle
  On the oak peg in the stable-wall.
  
  He entered the house
  Slowly, he had taken five drinks in Monterey
  And saw his tragedy of love, sin, and war
  At the disinterested romantic angle
  Misted with not unpleasing melancholy,
  Over with, new adventure ahead, a perilous cruise
  On the other ocean, and great play of guns
  On the other shore .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  at the turn of the stair he heard
  Hands hammering a locked door, and a voice unknown to him
  Crying, "Tamar, I loved you for your flame of passion
  And hated you for its deeds, all that we dead
  Can love or hate with: and now will you crust flame
  With filth, submit?
  
  Submit?
  
  Tamar,
  The defilement of the rideline dead was nothing
  To this defilement.
  
  " Then Lee jingling his spurs,
  Jumped four steps to the landing, "Who is there?
  
  You,
  Aunt Stella?
  
  " Old gray Aunt Jinny like a little child
  Moaning dr'ew back from him, and the mouth of Stella:
  "A man that's ready to cross land and water
  To set the world in order can't be expected
  To leave his house in order.
  
  " And Lee, "Listen, Aunt Stella,
  Who are you playing, I mean what voice out of the world of
  the dead
  Is speaking from you?
  
  " She answered, "Nothing.
  
  I was something
  Forty years back but now I'm only the bloodhound
  To bay at the smell of what they're doing in there.
  
  "
  "Who?
  
  Tamar?
  
  Blood?
  
  " "Too close in blood, I am the bloodstain
  On the doorsill of a crime, she does her business
  Under her own roof mostly.
  
  " "Tamar, Tamar,"
  Lee called, shaking the door.
  
  She from within
  Answered "I am here, Lee.
  
  Have you said good-by
  To Nita and Conchita in Monterey
  And your fat Fanny?
  
  But who is the woman at the door
  Making the noise?
  
  " He said, "Open the door;
  Open the door, Tamar.
  
  " And she, "I opened it for you,
  You are going to France to knock at other doors.
  
  I opened it for you and others.
  
  " "What others?
  
  " "Ask her,"
  Said the young fierce voice from old Aunt Stella's lips,
  "What other now?
  
  " "She is alone there," he answered,
  "A devil is in you.
  
  Tamar," he said, "tell her
  You are alone.
  
  " "No, Lee, I am asking in earnest,
  Who is the woman making the noise out there?
  
  Someone you've brought from Monterey?
  
  Tell her to go:
  Father is here.
  
  " "Why have you locked it, why have you
  locked it?
  
  "
  He felt the door-knob turning in his hand
  And the key shook the lock; Tamar stood in the doorway
  Wrapped in a loose blue robe that the auburn hair
  Burned on, and beyond her the old man knelt by the bed,
  His face in the lean twisted hands.
  
  "He was praying for me,"
  Tamar said quietly.
  
  "You are leaving to-morrow,
  He has only one child.
  
  " Then the old man lifting a face
  From which the flesh seemed to have fallen, and the eyes
  Dropped and been lost: "What will you do to him, Tamar?
  
  Tamar, have mercy.
  
  He was my son, years back.
  
  " She answered, "I am glad
  That you know who has power in the house"; and he
  Hid the disfigured face, between his wrists
  The beard kept moving, they thought him praying to God.
  
  And Tamar said, "It is coming to the end of the bad story,
  That needn't have been bad only we fools
  Botch everything, but a dead fool's the worst,
  This old man's sister who rackets at the doors
  And drove me mad, although she is nothing but a voice,
  Dead, shelled, and the shell rotted, but she had to meddle
  In the decencies of life here.
  
  Lee, if you truly
  Lust for the taste of a French woman I'll let you go
  For fear you die unsatisfied and plague
  Somebody's children with a ghost's hungers
  Forty years after death.
  
  Do I care, do I care?
  
  You shan't go, Lee.
  
  I told the old man I have a secret
  That will eat us all up .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and then, dead woman,
  What will you have to feed on?
  
  You spirits flicker out
  Too speedily, forty years is a long life for a ghost
  And you will only famish a little longer
  To whom I'd wish eternity.
  
  " "O Tamar, Tamar,"
  It answered out of Stella's mouth, "has the uttermost
  Not taught you anything yet, not even that extinction
  Is the only terror?
  
  " "You lie too much," she answered,
  "You'll enter it soon and not feel any stitch
  Of fear afterwards.
  
  Listen, Lee, your arms
  Were not the first man's to encircle me, and that spilled life
  Losing which let me free to laugh at God,
  I think you had no share in.
  
  " He trembled, and said
  "O Tamar has your sickness and my crime
  Cut you so deep?
  
  A lunatic in a dream
  Dreams nearer things than this.
  
  " "I'd never have told you,"
  She answered, "if his vicious anger-after I'd balanced
  Between you a long time and then chose you
  Hadn't followed his love's old night-way to my window
  And kindled fire in the room when I was gone,
  The spite-fire that might easily have eaten up
  And horribly, our helpless father, or this innocent
  Jinny .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "He did it, he did it, forgive me, Tamar.
  
  I thought that you gone mad .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Tamar, I know
  That you believe what you are saying but I
  Do not believe you.
  
  There was no one.
  
  " "The signal
  Was a lamp in the window, perhaps some night
  He'd come still if you'd set a lamp into my window.
  
  And when he climbed out of the cypress tree
  Then you would know him.
  
  " "I would mark him to know.
  
  But it's not true.
  
  " "Since I don't sleep there now
  You might try for the moth; if he doesn't come
  I'll tell you his name to-morrow.
  
  " Then the old man jerking
  Like dry bones wired pulled himself half erect
  With clutching at the bed-clothes: "Have mercy, Tamar.
  
  Lee, there's a trick in it, she is a burning fire,
  She is packed with death.
  
  I have learned her, I have learned her,
  I have learned her,
  Too cruel to measure strychnine, too cunning-cruel
  To snap a gun, aiming ourselves against us.
  
  "
  Lee answered, "There is almost nothing here to understand.
  
  If we all did wrong why have we all gone mad
  But me, I haven't a touch of it.
  
  Listen, dead woman,
  Do you feel any light here?
  
  " "Fire-as much light
  As a bird needs," the voice from the old woman
  Answered, "I am the gull on the butt of the mast
  Watching the ship founder, I'll fly away home
  When you go down, or a swallow above a chimney
  Watching the brick and mortar fly in the earthquake.
  
  "
  'Til just go look at the young cypress bark
  Under her window," he said, "it might have taken
  The bite of a thief's hobnails.
  
  " When he was gone
  And jingling down the stair, then Tamar: "Poor people,
  Why do you cry out so?
  
  I have three witnesses,
  The old man that died to-day, and a dead woman
  Forty years dead, and an idiot, and only one of you
  Decently quiet.
  
  There is the great and quiet water
  Reaching to Asia, and in an hour or so
  The still stars will show over it but I am quieter
  Inside than even the ocean or the stars.
  
  Though I have to kindle paper flares of passion
  Sometimes, to fool you with.
  
  But I was thinking
  Last night, that people all over the world
  Are doing much worse and suffering much more than we
  This wartime, and the stars don't wink, and the ocean
  Storms perhaps less than usual.
  
  " Then the dead woman,
  "Wild life, she has touched the ice-core of things and learned
  Something, that frost burns worse than fire.
  
  " "O, it's not true,"
  She answered, "frost is kind; why, almost nothing
  You say is true.
  
  Helen, do you remember at all
  The beauty and strangeness of this place?
  
  Old cypresses
  The sailor wind works into deep-sea knots
  A thousand years; age-reddened granite
  That was the world's cradle and crumbles apieces
  Now that we're all grown up, breaks out at the roots;
  And underneath it the old gray-granite strength
  Is neither glad nor sorry to take the seas
  Of all the storms forever and stand as firmly
  As when the red hawk wings of the first dawn
  Streamed up the sky over it: there is one more beautiful thing,
  Water that owns the north and west and south
  And is all colors and never is all quiet,
  And the fogs are its breath and float along the branches of
  the cypresses.
  
  And I forgot the coals of ruby lichen
  That glow in the fog on the old twigs.
  
  To live here
  Seventy-five years or eighty, and have children,
  And watch these things fill up their eyes, would not
  Be a bad life .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I'd rather be what I am,
  Feeling this peace and joy, the fire's joy's burning,
  And I have my peace.
  
  " Then the old man in the dull
  And heartless voice answered, "The strangest thing
  Is that He never speaks: we know we are damned, why should
  He speak?
  
  The book
  Is written already.
  
  Cauldwell, Cauldwell, Cauldwell, Cauldwell.
  
  Eternal death, eternal wrath, eternal torture, eternity, eternity,
  eternity .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  That's after the judgment.
  
  " "You needn't have any fear, old
  father,
  Of anything to happen after to-morrow," Tamar answered, "we
  have turned every page
  But the last page, and now our paper's so worn out and tissuey
  I can read it already
  Right through the leaf, print backwards.
  
  "
  It was twilight in the
  room, the shiny side of the wheel
  Dipping toward Asia; and the year dipping toward winter encrimsoned
  the grave spokes of sundown;
  And jingling in the door Lee Cauldwell with the day's-death
  flush upon his face: "Father:
  There are marks on the cypress: a hell of a way to send your
  soldier off: I want to talk to her
  Alone.
  
  You and the women " he flung his hand out, meaning
  "go.
  
  " The old man without speaking
  Moved to the door, propping his weakness on a chair and on
  the door-frame, and Lee entering
  Passed him and the two women followed him three, if Stella
  were onebut when they had passed the doorway
  Old Cauldwcll turned, and tottering in it: "Death is the horror,"
  he said, "nothing else lasts, pain passes,
  Death's the only trap.
  
  I am much too wise to swing myself in
  the stable on a rope from a rafter.
  
  Helen, Helen,
  You know about death.
  
  " "It is cold," she answered from the
  hallway; "unspeakably hopeless .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "You curse of talkers,
  Go," he said, and he shut the door against them and said, "Slut,
  how many, how many?
  
  " She, laughing,
  "I knew you would be sweet to me: I am still sick: did you find
  marks in the bark?
  
  I am still sick, Lee;
  You don't intend killing me?
  
  " "Flogging, whipping, whipping,
  is there anything male about here
  You haven't used yet?
  
  Agh you mouth, you open mouth.
  
  But
  I won't touch you.
  
  " "Let me say something,"
  She answered, standing dark against the west in the window, the
  death of the winter rose of evening
  Behind her little high-poised head, and threading the brown
  twilight of the room with the silver
  Exultance of her voice, "My brother can you feel how happy
  I am but how far off too?
  
  If I have done wrong it has turned good to me, I could almost
  be sorry that I have to die now
  Out of such freedom; if I were standing back of the evening
  crimson on a mountain in Asia
  All the fool shames you can whip up into a filth of words would
  not be farther off me,
  Nor any fear of anything, if I stood in the evening star and saw
  this dusty dime's worth
  A dot of light, dropped up the star-gleam.
  
  Poor brother, poor
  brother, you played the fool too
  But not enough, it is not enough to taste delight and passion and
  disgust and loathing
  And agony, you have to be wide alive, 'an open mouth' you
  said, all the while, to reach this heaven
  You'll never grow up to.
  
  Though it's possible if I'd let you
  go asoldiering, there on the dunghills
  Of death and fire .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ah, you'd taste nothing even there but
  the officers' orders, beef and brandy,
  And the tired bodies of a few black-eyed French dance-girls:
  it is better for you
  To be lost here than there.
  
  " "You are up in the evening star,"
  he said, "you can't feel this," flat-handed
  Striking her cheek, "you are up on a mountain in Asia, who
  made you believe that you could keep me
  Or let me go?
  
  I am going to-morrow, to-night I set the house
  in order.
  
  " "There is nothing now
  You can be sorry for," she answered, "not even this, it is out
  of the count, the cup ran over
  Yesterday.
  
  " He turned and left the room, the foolish tune of
  the spurs tinkled
  Hallway and stair.
  
  Tamar, handling the fiery spot upon her
  cheek smiled in the darkness,
  Feeling so sure of the end.
  
  "Night after night he has ridden to
  the granite at the rivermouth
  And missed my light, to-night he will see it, the Lobos star he
  called it, and look and look to be sure
  It is not a ship's light nor a star's, there in the south, then he
  will come, and my three lovers
  Under one roof.
  
  "
  VII
  Lee Cauldwell felt his way in the dark among the cypress trees,
  and turning
  At the stable-door saw the evening star, he felt for the lantern
  Hung on the bent nail to the right of the door,
  Lighted it, and in the sweet hay-dusty darkness
  Found the black quirt that hung beside the saddle
  And seemed a living snake in the hand, then he opened
  A locker full of hunter's gear and tumbled
  Leather and iron to the floor for an old sheath-knife
  Under all the rest; he took the knife and whip
  And Tamar in the dark of the westward bedroom heard him
  Tinkle on the stair and jingle in the hall, slow steps
  Moving to hers, the room that had been her room
  Before this illness; she felt him as if she had been there
  Lighting her lamp and setting it on the sill,
  Then felt him look about the little room and feel it
  Breathing and warm with her once habitancy
  And the hours of hers and his there, and soften almost
  To childish tears at trifles on the wall-,
  And then he would look at the bed and stiffen
  In a brittle rage, feel with thrust under-lip
  Virtuous, an outcrop of morality in him
  To grow ridiculous and wish to be cruel,
  And so return to her.
  
  Hastily, without light,
  She redded up some of the room's untidiness,
  Thrust into the stove the folds of bandage-cloth,
  Straightened the bed a little, and laying aside
  The loose blue robe lay down in the bed to await him,
  Who, throwing open the door, "Tamar: I've got no right
  To put my hands into your life, I see
  That each of us lives only a little while
  And must do what he can with it: so, I'm going
  To-night; I'd nearly worked myself to the act
  Of some new foolishness: are you there, Tamar?
  
  The lamp?
  
  " He struck a match and saw her eyes
  Shine on him from the pillow and when the lamp
  Was lighted he began again: "It's all such foolishness.
  
  Well, you and I are done.
  
  I set your lamp for a signal on the sill,
  I'll take it away or help you to that room,
  Whichever you like.
  
  That'll be my last hand in the game.
  
  It won't take me ten minutes to pack and go, my plan's
  Not to risk losing temper and have half-decent
  Thoughts of you while I'm gone, and you of me, Tamar.
  
  "
  She lay too quietly and the shining eyes
  Seemed not to hide amusement, he waited for her
  To acknowledge not in direct words perhaps
  His generosity, but she silent, "Well, shall I leave the lamp?
  
  "
  He said, not all so kindly, and Tamar, "I've no one else
  If you are going.
  
  But if you'd stay I wouldn't
  Touch you again, ever.
  
  Agh, you can't wait
  To get to France to crawl into strange beds,
  But Monterey to-night.
  
  You what a beast.
  
  You like them dirty.
  
  " He said, "You're a fool, Tamar.
  
  Well, so I'll leave the lamp.
  
  Good-by, Tamar.
  
  "
  "You said you'd help me down the hall.
  
  " "Yes, even that.
  
  What must I do, carry you?
  
  " "Is the bed together?
  
  See whether there are sheets and covers on it.
  
  "
  He went, and returned icy-pale.
  
  "It hasn't been changed
  Since I smelled fire and ran into the room
  Six or eight days ago.
  
  The cupboard door-frame
  Is all charcoal.
  
  By God, Tamar,
  If I believed he'd done it-who is he, Andrews?
  
  -
  You and your lies have made a horror in the house.
  
  What, shall I go, shall I go?
  
  " "Me?
  
  who made me
  Believe that I could keep you or let you go.
  
  Didn't you say?
  
  " "You still believe it," he answered,
  Doubling his fists to hold in anger, the passionate need
  Of striking her like a torrent in his throat,
  "Believe it, fool.
  
  " "Poor brother.
  
  You will never see France.
  
  Never wear uniform nor learn how to fasten
  A bayonet to a gun-barrel.
  
  " "Come.
  
  Stop talking.
  
  Get up, come to your room.
  
  " "Carry me," she answered.
  
  "Though I am not really much too tired to walk.
  
  You used to like me.
  
  " "Well, to get done and be gone,"
  He said, bending above her, she enlaced his neck
  Softly and strongly and raised her knees to let
  His arms slip under them, he like a man stung by a serpent
  Felt weakness and then rage, panted to lift her
  And staggered in the doorway and in the dark hallway
  Grew dizzy, and difficultly went on and groaning
  Dropped her on the bed in her own room, she did not move
  To cover herself, then he drawing his palm
  Across his forehead found it streaming wet
  And said, "You whore, you whore, you whore.
  
  Well, you shall
  have it,
  You've earned it," and he twisted himself to the little table
  And took the whip, the oiled black supple quirt,
  Loaded at the handle, that seemed a living snake in the hand,
  And felt the exasperate force of his whole baffled
  And blindfold life flow sideways into the shoulder
  Swinging it, and half repenting while it dropped
  Sickened to see the beautiful bare white
  Blemishless body writhe under it before it fell,
  The loins pressed into the bed, the breast and head
  Twisting erect, and at the noise of the stroke
  He made a hoarse cry in his throat but she
  Took it silently, and lay still afterward,
  Her head so stricken backward that the neck
  Seemed strained to breaking, the coppery pad of her hair
  Crushed on the shoulder-blades, while that red snake-trail
  Swelled visibly from the waist and flank down the left thigh.
  
  "O God, God, God," he groaned; and she, her whole body
  Twitching on the white bed whispered between her teeth
  "It was in the bargain," and from her bitten lip
  A trickle of blood ran down to the pillow.
  
  That one light in the room,
  The lamp on the sill, did not turn redder for blood nor with the
  whipstripe
  But shone serene and innocent up the northward night, writing
  a long pale-golden track
  In the river's arm of sea, and beyond the river's mouth where
  the old lion's teeth of blunted granite
  Crop out of the headland young Will Andrews kissed it with
  his eyes, rode south and crossed the river's
  Late-summer sand-lock.
  
  Figures of fire moved in the hills on
  the left, the pasture-fires and brush-fires
  Men kindle before rain, on a southerly wind the smell of the
  smoke reached him, the sea on his right
  Breathed; when he skirted the darkness of the gum-tree grove
  at San Jose creek-mouth he remembered
  Verdugo killed there; Sylvia Vierra and her man had lived in
  the little white-washed farm-hut
  Under the surf-reverberant blue-gums, two years ago they had
  had much wine in the house, their friend
  Verdugo came avisiting, he being drunk on the raw plenty of
  wine they thought abused
  Nine-year-old Mary, Sylvia's daughter, they struck him from
  behind and when he was down unmanned him
  With the kitchen knife, then plotted drunkenly for he seemed
  to be dead-where to dispose the body.
  
  That evening Tamar Cauldwell riding her white pony along
  the coast-road saw a great bonfire
  Periling the gum-tree grove, and riding under the smoke met evil
  odors, turning in there
  Saw by the firelight a man's feet hang out of the fire; then Tamar
  never having suffered
  Fear in her life, knocked at the hut's door and unanswered entered,
  and found the Vierras asleep
  Steaming away their wine, but little Mary weeping.
  
  She had
  taken the child and ridden homeward.
  
  Young Andrews thinking of that idyll of the country gulped at
  the smoke from the hills and tethered
  His horse in the hiding of a clump of pines, and climbed the
  line-fence.
  
  Turning a cypress thicket
  He saw a figure sway in the starlight, and stood still, breathless.
  
  A woman: Tamar?
  
  Not Tamar:
  No one he knew: it faced the east gables of the house and seemed
  twisting its hands and suddenly
  Flung up both arms to its face and passed out of the patch of
  starlight.
  
  The boy, troubled and cautious,
  Turned the other way and circling to the south face of the
  house peered from behind the buttressed
  Base of a seventy-year-old trunk that yellow light on the other
  side clothed, and he saw
  A lamp on the table and three people sitting by it; the old man,
  stiff-jointed as a corpse,
  Grotesquely erect, and old Aunt Stella her lips continually in
  motion, and old Jinny
  Cross-legg'd having drawn up her ankles into her chair, nodding
  asleep.
  
  At length Aunt Stella
  Ceased talking, none of the three stirred.
  
  Young Andrews backed
  into the wood and warily finishing
  His circuit stood in the darkness under Tamar's window.
  
  The
  strong young tree to help him to it
  Still wore on its boughs her lamplight, then he climbed and set
  his hands on the sill, his feet on the ledge
  Under it, and Tamar came to the window and took up the lamp
  to let him enter.
  
  Her face
  White in the yellow lamp's glow, with sharp shadows under the
  eyes and a high look of joy
  He had never seen there frightened him, and she said, "I have
  been sick, you know.
  
  " "I heard," he answered,
  "O Tamar, I have been lonely.
  
  We must let them know, we
  can't go on, my place is with you
  When you most need me.
  
  " "We will tell them to-night," she
  said, and kissed his mouth and called, "Lee, Lee,
  Come.
  
  He has come.
  
  " "What?
  
  Now," he said.
  
  "I have told Lee.
  
  I was sick, he was sorry for me, he is going
  To camp to-morrow, he wants to see you and say good-by.
  
  "
  Lee entered while she spoke and quietly
  Held out his hand and Andrews took it.
  
  "Talk to each other,"
  Tamar said, "I am very tired
  And must lie down.
  
  " Lee muttered "She's been awfully sick, it
  scared us, you were lucky, Bill Andrews,
  Not to be here.
  
  " "I didn't think so," he answered, "what was it,
  Lee?
  
  " "Well, it's all over," Lee said,
  Shifting his feet, "I'm off to-morrow.
  
  I'm glad we're friends to
  say good-by.
  
  Be good to her, won't you.
  
  "
  And the other, "O God knows I will.
  
  All I can do.
  
  But of course
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Lee .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  if they need me
  She knows I won't beg off because I'm .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  married .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  maybe I'll see you over there.
  
  " "O," said Tamar
  Laughing, "you too?
  
  " and she sat up on the bed saying, "Lee:
  go and call father if he's able.
  
  We ought to tell him, he ought to meet my-husband.
  
  " "I'll see
  if he can," Lee answered, "he was unwell
  To-day, and if he's in bed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " He left the room, then Tamar:
  "Look.
  
  Bring the lamp.
  
  What Lee did to me.
  
  "
  She opened the blue robe and bared her flank and thigh showing
  the long whip-mark.
  
  "I have a story.
  
  You must sec this to believe it.
  
  " He turned giddy, the sweet
  slenderness
  Dazzling him, and the lamp shook in his hand, for the sharp spasm
  of physical pain one feels
  At sight of a wound shot up his entrails.
  
  That long welt of red on
  the tender flesh, the blood-flecks
  And tortured broken little channels of blood crossing it.
  
  "Tamar,
  Tamar!" "Put down the lamp,
  And when they come I'll tell you the story.
  
  " "What shall I do?
  
  "
  "Why, nothing, nothing.
  
  Poor boy," she said,
  Pityingly, "I think you are too glad of your life to have come
  Into this house, you are not hard enough, you are like my mother,
  only stone or fire
  Should marry into this house.
  
  " Then he bewildered looking at
  the blackened door-frame, "Why, yes,"
  Laughed Tamar, "it is here, it has been here, the bridegroom's
  here already.
  
  O Will I have suffered .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Things I daren't tell.
  
  " "What do you mean, Tamar?
  
  " "Nothing,
  I mustn't tell you, you are too high-tempered,
  You would do something.
  
  Dear, there are things so wicked that
  nothing you can do can make them better,
  So horrible now they are done that even to touch or try to mend
  or punish them is only to widen
  Horror: like poking at a corpse in a pool.
  
  And father's old and
  helpless.
  
  " "Your father, Tamar?
  
  "
  "And not to blame.
  
  I think he hardly even knew what Lee"
  "Lee?
  
  " "This much I'll tell you,
  You have to know it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  our love, your love and mine, had .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  fruit, would have been fruitful, we were going to have
  A child, and I was happy and frightened, and it is dead.
  
  O God,
  O God, O God, I wish
  I too had been born too soon and died with the eyes unopened,
  not a cry, darkness, darkness,
  And to be hidden away.
  
  They did it to me; with other abuse,
  worse violence.
  
  " Meanwhile Lee Cauldwell
  Finding his father with the two old women in the room downstairs,
  "Father," he said,
  "Tamar was asking for you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " and Helen's voice through old
  Aunt Stella answered, "She has enough,
  Tell her she has enough.
  
  " "Aunt Stella," he said, "how long will
  you keep it up?
  
  Our trouble's clearing,
  Let your ghosts be.
  
  " "She has you and the other," she answered,
  "let me have this one.
  
  Are we buzzards to quarrel
  Over you dead, we ghosts?
  
  " Then Lee turning his shoulder at her,
  "You must come up, father.
  
  Do you remember the Andrews place that's up the valley?
  
  Young
  Andrews is upstairs with Tamar,
  He wants to marry her.
  
  You know I have to go away to-morrow,
  remember?
  
  and I'll go happier
  To leave her .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  taken care of.
  
  So you'll see him, father?
  
  "
  "Who is it?
  
  " asked the old man.
  
  "The bridegroom,"
  Said Helen's voice, "a bridegroom for your Tamar, and the priest
  will be fire and blood the witness,
  And they will live together in a house where the mice are moles.
  
  "
  "Why do you plague me," he answered
  Plaintively, and Lee: "Come, father," and he lifting his face,
  "I have prayed to the hills to come and cover me,
  We are on the drop-off cliff of the world and dare not meet Him,
  I with two days to live, even I
  Shall watch the ocean boiling and the sea curl up like paper in a
  fire and the dry bed
  Crack to the bottom: I have good news for her, I will see her.
  
  "
  "And I to tell her she may take
  Two but not three," said Helen.
  
  "Stay here, stay here, be quiet,"
  Lee answered angrily, "can I take up
  The whole menagerie, raving?
  
  " He turned in the door and heard
  his father move behind him and said,
  "If you come up, be quiet," and at the door upstairs, "Father is
  tired and sick, he'll only
  Speak to you, Andrews, and must go to bed; he's worried about
  my going away to-morrow.
  
  This is Bill Andrews, father.
  
  " And Tamar coming to the door,
  "Let him come in, it's dark here,
  No, bring him in.
  
  Father come in.
  
  What, shall the men that made
  your war suck up their millions,
  Not I my three?
  
  " Then Andrews: "If Tamar is well enough to
  go to-night I will take her to-night.
  
  You will be well when you are out of this house.
  
  " "You hate it
  still," said Tamar.
  
  "He hates the house,"
  She said to Lee, leading his eyes with the significance in hers to
  the blackened door-frame,
  "Well, I will go with you to-morrow.
  
  " And Lee, "Listen, Will
  Andrews, I heard from somebody
  You know who set the fire here.
  
  " "No, not that," he answered,
  "but I know other worse things
  That have been done here.
  
  " "Fire, fire," moaned the old man,
  "the fire of the Lord coming in judgment.
  
  Tamar,
  It is well with us, be happy, He won't torture the wicked, He will
  rub them out and suddenly
  With instant fire.
  
  We shall be nothing.
  
  " "Come, Tamar," Andrews
  cried, "to-night.
  
  I daren't leave you.
  
  "
  "For fear I ask her," said Lee.
  
  "You did it, then.
  
  You set the fire.
  
  "
  "No, that's too idiot
  A lie to answer," he said, "what do I know about your fires?
  
  I know something
  Worse than arson.
  
  And saw the horrible new scar of a whip
  Not to be paid this way!" He felt the jerk of his arm striking
  And his fist hitting the sharp edge of the jawbone, but yet
  When Lee staggered and closed in with a groan,
  Clutching him, fumbling for his throat, Will thought "What a fool
  To make a nasty show of us before Tamar
  And the others, why does he want to fight?
  
  " and indignantly
  Pushed him off and struck twice, both fists, Lee dropped
  And scrambled on hands and knees by the little table.
  
  Then the old man cried, "We shall be nothing, nothing.
  
  O but that's frightful.
  
  "
  And Will turning to Tamar saw such hatred
  Wrinkle her face he felt a horrible surge
  Of nausea in him, then with bare teeth she smiled at him
  And he believed the hate was for her brother
  And said, "Ah Tamar, come.
  
  " Meanwhile the Helen
  That spoke out of the lungs and ran in the nerves
  Of old Aunt Stella caught the old man David Cauldwell
  By the loose flapping sleeve and the lean arm,
  Saying in a clotted amorous voice, "Come, David,
  My brother, my lover, O honey come, she has no eyes for you,
  She feasts on young men.
  
  But you to me, to me,
  Are as beautiful as when we dared
  Desperate pleasure, naked, ages ago,
  In the room and by the sea.
  
  " "Father," said Tamar,
  "It is only an hour to the end, whom do you want
  To-night?
  
  Stay here by me.
  
  " "I was hunting for something," said
  Lee Cauldwell,
  "Here it is, here it is," and had the sheath-knife bared
  And struck up from the floor, rising, the blade
  Ripped cloth and skin along his enemy's belly
  And the leather belt catching it deflected the point
  Into the bowels, Andrews coughed and fell backward
  And Lee falling across him stabbed at his throat
  But struck too high and opened the right cheek,
  The knife scraping on bone and teeth, then Tamar
  In a sea-gull voice, "I dreamed it in his face,
  I dreamed a T cut in his face
  " "You and your dreams
  Have done for us," Lee groaned answer.
  
  "Akh, all blood, blood.
  
  What did you say to make him hit me?
  
  "
  Though it is not thought
  That the dead intervene between the minds
  And deeds of the living, that they are witnesses,
  If anything of their spirits with any memory
  Survive and not in prison, would seem as likely
  As that an exile should look longingly home:
  And the mist-face of that mother at the window
  Wavering was but a witness, could but watch,
  Neither prevent nor cause: no doubt there are many
  Such watchers in the world: the same whom Andrews,
  Stepping like a thief among the cypress clumps an hour before
  Saw twist her hands and suddenly fling up both vaporous arms
  and sway out of the starlight,
  She now was watching at the downstairs window
  Old Jinny alone in the room, and saw, as the dead see, the
  thoughts
  More clearly than the cloth and skin; the child mind
  In that old flesh gathered home on itself
  In coils, laboring to warm a memory,
  And worked on by an effluence, petulantly pushing away
  The easier memories of its open time
  Forty years back, power flowing from someone in that house
  Belting it in, pressing it to its labor,
  Making it shape in itself the memory of to-day's
  Vision, the watcher saw it, how could she know it
  Or know from whence?
  
  a girl naked, no, wrapped in fire,
  Filmed in white sheets of fire.
  
  "Why, I'm like God,"
  Old Jinny had said, "I see through walls," a girl
  Naked though clothed in fire, and under the arms
  Naked, no hair,- "Ah to be like her, to be like her, probably
  Cloth, hair, burned off"; displaying herself before a wild old man
  Who appeared pan of the joy: "Ah, to be like her,
  Fire is so sweet, they never let me play with it,
  No one loves Jinny, wouldn't fire be a father
  And hold her in his arms?
  
  Fire is so sweet,"
  She hovered the hot lamp, "sweet fire, sweet light,"
  She held a rag of paper above it, "O dear, dear fire,
  Come and kiss Jinny, no one's looking,
  Jinny's alone.
  
  Dear star, dear light, O lovely fire
  Won't you come out, why is it turning black,
  Ah come, Ah come, hug Jinny.
  
  " The hungry beautiful bird
  Hopped from its bird-cage to her.
  
  "I've got my star
  Ah love, Ah love, and here's more paper
  And a little of Jinny's dress, love, lovely light,
  Jinny so loves you, Jinny's baby, Jinny's baby,
  O," she screamed, "Oo, Oo, Oo," and ran to the window, folded
  In a terrible wreath, and at her side the curtains
  Danced into flame, and over her head; the gasp
  That followed on a cry drew down a sword
  Of flame to her lungs, pain ceased, and thinking "Father"
  She dropped herself into the arms of the fire,
  Huddling under the sill, and her spirit unprisoned
  Filled all the room and felt a nuptial joy
  In mixing with the bright and eager flame.
  
  While from that blackened morsel on the floor
  Fire spread to the wall and gnawed it through, and the window-glass
  Crackling and tinkling a rush of south wind fed
  The eagerness in the house.
  
  They heard upstairs
  That brutal arch of crying, the quick crescendo,
  The long drop and the following moan, Will Andrews
  Struggled to rise and like a gopher-snake that a child
  Has mashed the head of with a stone, he waggled
  The blood-clot of his head over the floor
  Gulping "You devils, you devils.
  
  " Lee would have run down
  But Tamar clung to him, the old man on his knees
  Muttered to God, and old Aunt Stella
  In no voice but her own screamed, screamed.
  
  Then fire
  Was heard roaring, the door leaked threads of smoke,
  Lee caught up Tamar in his arms and turned
  To the window, the cypress-ladder, but his first step,
  Blind, with the burden in his arms, the smoke in his eyes,
  Trampled his murdered man on the floor who turning
  Caught the other ankle and Lee went down and Tamar
  So lovingly wound him that he could not rise
  Till the house was full of its bright death; then Tamar:
  "I will not let you take me.
  
  Go if you want.
  
  "
  He answered, "You devil, shall I go?
  
  " "You wouldn't stay!
  Think of your black-eyed French girls.
  
  " "We are on the edge
  of it," he answered,
  "Tamar, be decent for a minute.
  
  " "I have my three lovers
  Here in one room, none of them will go out,
  How can I help being happy?
  
  This old man
  Has prayed the end of the world onto us all,
  And which of you leaves me?
  
  " Then the old man: "O what
  mountain,
  What mountain, what mountain?
  
  " And Lee, "Father.
  
  The
  window
  We'll follow you.
  
  " But he kneeling would not rise,
  While the house moved and the floor sagged to the south
  And old Aunt Stella through the opening door
  Ran into the red and black, and did not scream
  Any more; then Tamar, "Did you think you would go
  Laughing through France?
  
  " And the old man, "Fierce, fierce
  light,
  Have pity, Christ have pity, Christ have pity, Christ have pity,
  Christ have pity,
  Christ have pity .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  And Tamar with her back to the window embraced
  Her brother, who struggled toward it, but the floor
  Turned like a wheel.
  
  Grass grows where the flame flowered;
  A hollowed lawn strewn with a few black stones
  And the brick of broken chimneys; all about there
  The old trees, some of them scarred with fire, endure the sea
  wind.

• The Answer Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Then what is the answer?
  
  - Not to be deluded by dreams.
  
  To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
  and their tyrants come, many times before.
  
  When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
  the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
  
  To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
  and not wish for evil; and not be duped
  By dreams of universal justice or happiness.
  
  These dreams will
  not be fulfilled.
  
  To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
  the whole remains beautiful.
  
  A severed hand
  Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
  and his history… for contemplation or in fact…
  Often appears atrociously ugly.
  
  Integrity is wholeness,
  the greatest beauty is
  Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
  of the universe.
  
  Love that, not man
  Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
  or drown in despair when his days darken.

• The Beaks Of Eagles Read Poem Log in to favourite

  An eagle's nest on the head of an old redwood on one of the
  precipice-footed ridges
  Above Ventana Creek, that jagged country which nothing but a
  falling meteor will ever plow; no horseman
  Will ever ride there, no hunter cross this ridge but the winged
  ones, no one will steal the eggs from this fortress.
  
  The she-eagle is old, her mate was shot long ago, she is now mated
  with a son of hers.
  
  When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same
  tree, in the splinters of the thunderbolt.
  
  The she-eagle is older than I; she was here when the fires of
  eighty-five raged on these ridges,
  She was lately fledged and dared not hunt ahead of them but ate
  scorched meat.
  
  The world has changed in her time;
  Humanity has multiplied, but not here; men's hopes and thoughts
  and customs have changed, their powers are enlarged,
  Their powers and their follies have become fantastic,
  The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly.
  
  The
  motor and the plane and the great war have gone over him,
  And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle
  Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and
  is never tired; dreams the same dreams,
  And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the throats
  of these living mountains.
  
  It is good for man
  To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and
  anguish, not to go down the dinosaur's way
  Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him
  To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact
  in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.

• The Bed By The Window Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed
  When we built the house, it is ready waiting,
  Unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth, who hardly suspects
  Its latter purpose.
  
  I often regard it,
  With neither dislike nor desire; rather with both, so equalled
  That they kill each other and a crystalline interest
  Remains alone.
  
  We are safe to finish what we have to finish;
  And then it will sound rather like music
  When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky
  Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: "Come, Jeffers.
  
  "

• The Bird With The Dark Plumes Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The bird with the dark plumes in my blood,
  That never for one moment however I patched my truces
  Consented to make peace with the people,
  It is pitiful now to watch her pleasure In a breath of
  tempest
  Breaking the sad promise of spring.
  
  Are these that morose hawk's wings, vaulting, a mere
  mad swallow's,
  The snow-shed peak, the violent precipice?
  
  Poor outlaw that would not value their praise do you
  prize their blame?
  
  "Their liking" she said "was a long creance,
  But let them be kind enough to hate me that opens the
  sky.
  
  "
  It is almost as foolish my poor falcon
  To want hatred as to want love; and harder to win.

• The Bloody Sire Read Poem Log in to favourite

  It is not bad.
  
  Let them play.
  
  Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
  Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
  
  It is not bad, it is high time,
  Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.
  
  What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
  The fleet limbs of the antelope?
  
  What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
  Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?
  
  Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.
  
  Who would remember Helen’s face
  Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
  
  Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,
  The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
  
  Violence, the bloody sire of all the world’s values.
  
  Never weep, let them play,
  Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

• The Broadstone Read Poem Log in to favourite

  NEAR FINVOY, COUNTY ANTRIM
  We climbed by the old quarries to the wide highland of heath,
  On the slope of a swale a giant dolmen,
  Three heavy basalt pillars upholding the enormous skb,
  Towers and abides as if time were nothing.
  
  The hard stones are hardly dusted with lichen in nobody knows
  What ages of autumns in this high solitude
  Since a recordless tribe of an unknown race lifted them up
  To be the availing hero's memorial,
  And temple of his power.
  
  They gathered their slighter dead
  from the biting
  Winds of time in his lee, the wide moor
  About him is swollen with barrows and breaks upon many stones,
  Lean gray guardians of old urned ashes,
  In waves on waves of purple heather and blithe spray of its bells.
  
  Here lies the hero, more than half God,
  And nobody knows his name nor his race, in the bee-bright
  necropolis,
  With the stone circle and his tribe around him.
  
  Sometimes perhaps (but who'd confess it?
  
  ) in soft adolescence
  We used to wonder at the world, and have wished
  To hear some final harmony resolve the discords of life?
  
  Here they are all perfectly resolved.

• The Broken Balance Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I.
  
  Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla
  The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
  Were all suddenly struck quiet
  And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,
  So fierce and final, a brazen
  Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.
  
  They marvelled; the soothsayers answered:
  "Although the Gods are little troubled toward men, at the end of each period
  A sign is declared in heaven
  Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people; the Romans
  Rule, and Etruria is finished;
  A wise mariner will trim the sails to the wind.
  
  "
  I heard yesterday
  So shrill and mournful a trumpet-blast,
  It was hard to be wise….
  
  You must eat change and endure; not be much troubled
  For the people; they will have their happiness.
  
  When the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar will carry It;
  When life grows hateful, there's power…
  II.
  
  To the Children
  Power's good; life is not always good but power's good.
  
  So you must think when abundance
  Makes pawns of people and all the loaves are one dough.
  
  The steep singleness of passion
  Dies; they will say, "What was that?
  
  " but the power triumphs.
  
  Loveliness will live under glass
  And beauty will go savage in the secret mountains.
  
  There is beauty in power also.
  
  You children must widen your minds' eyes to take mountains
  Instead of faces, and millions
  Instead of persons; not to hate life; and massed power
  After the lone hawk's dead.
  
  III
  That light blood-loving weasel, a tongue of yellow
  Fire licking the sides of the gray stones,
  Has a more passionate and more pure heart
  In the snake-slender flanks than man can imagine;
  But he is betrayed by his own courage,
  The man who kills him is like a cloud hiding a star.
  
  Then praise the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron;
  The black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock
  With shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills
  The red-shafted woodpecker flying,
  A white star between blood-color wing-clouds,
  Across the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade.
  
  These live their felt natures; they know their norm
  And live it to the brim; they understand life.
  
  While men moulding themselves to the anthill have choked
  Their natures until the souls the in them;
  They have sold themselves for toys and protection:
  No, but consider awhile: what else?
  
  Men sold for toys.
  
  Uneasy and fractional people, having no center
  But in the eyes and mouths that surround them,
  Having no function but to serve and support
  Civilization, the enemy of man,
  No wonder they live insanely, and desire
  With their tongues, progress; with their eyes, pleasure; with their hearts, death.
  
  Their ancestors were good hunters, good herdsmen and swordsman,
  But now the world is turned upside down;
  The good do evil, the hope's in criminals; in vice
  That dissolves the cities and war to destroy them.
  
  Through wars and corruptions the house will fall.
  
  Mourn whom it falls on.
  
  Be glad: the house is mined, it will fall.
  
  IV
  Rain, hail and brutal sun, the plow in the roots,
  The pitiless pruning-iron in the branches,
  Strengthen the vines, they are all feeding friends
  Or powerless foes until the grapes purple.
  
  But when you have ripened your berries it is time to begin to perish.
  
  The world sickens with change, rain becomes poison,
  The earth is a pit, it Is time to perish.
  
  The vines are fey, the very kindness of nature
  Corrupts what her cruelty before strengthened.
  
  When you stand on the peak of time it is time to begin to perish.
  
  Reach down the long morbid roots that forget the plow,
  Discover the depths; let the long pale tendrils
  Spend all to discover the sky, now nothing is good
  But only the steel mirrors of discovery .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And the beautiful enormous dawns of time, after we perish.
  
  V
  Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth
  Under men's hands and their minds,
  The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,
  The spreading fungus, the slime-threads
  And spores; my own coast's obscene future: I remember the farther
  Future, and the last man dying
  Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars.
  
  It was only a moment's accident,
  The race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal
  Splendor; from here I can even
  Perceive that that snuffed candle had something .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  a fantastic virtue,
  A faint and unshapely pathos .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  So death will flatter them at last: what, even the bald ape's by-shot
  Was moderately admirable?
  
  VI.
  
  Palinode
  All summer neither rain nor wave washes the cormorants'
  Perch, and their droppings have painted it shining white.
  
  If the excrement of fish-eaters makes the brown rock a snow-mountain
  At noon, a rose in the morning, a beacon at moonrise
  On the black water: it is barely possible that even men's present
  Lives are something; their arts and sciences (by moonlight)
  Not wholly ridiculous, nor their cities merely an offense.
  
  VII
  Under my windows, between the road and the sea-cliff, bitter wild grass
  Stands narrowed between the people and the storm.
  
  The ocean winter after winter gnaws at its earth, the wheels and the feet
  Summer after summer encroach and destroy.
  
  Stubborn green life, for the cliff-eater I cannot comfort you, ignorant which color,
  Gray-blue or pale-green, will please the late stars;
  But laugh at the other, your seed shall enjoy wonderful vengeance's and suck
  The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.

• The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream Read Poem Log in to favourite

  from CAWDOR
  While George went to the house
  For his revolver, Michal climbed up the hill
  Weeping; but when he came with death in his hand
  She'd not go away, but watched.
  
  At the one shot
  The great dark bird leaped at the roof of the cage
  In silence and struck the wood; it fell, then suddenly
  Looked small and soft, muffled in its folded wings.
  
  The nerves of men after they die dream dimly
  And dwindle into their peace; they are not very passionate,
  And what they had was mostly spent while they lived.
  
  They are sieves for leaking desire; they have many pleasures
  And conversations; their dreams too are like that.
  
  The unsocial birds are a greater race;
  Cold-eyed, and their blood burns.
  
  What leaped up to death,
  The extension of one storm-dark wing filling
  its world,
  Was more than the soft garment that fell.
  
  Something had flown
  away.
  
  Oh cage-hoarded desire,
  Like the blade of a breaking wave reaped by the wind, or flame
  rising from fire, or cloud-coiled lightning
  Suddenly unfurled in the cave of heaven: I that am stationed,
  and cold at heart, incapable of burning,
  My blood like standing sea-water lapped in a stone pool, my desire
  to the rock, how can I speak of you?
  
  Mine will go down to the deep rock.
  
  This rose,
  Possessing the air over its emptied prison,
  The eager powers at its shoulders waving shadowless
  Unwound the ever-widened spirals of flight
  As a star light, it spins the night-stabbing threads
  From its own strength and substance: so the aquiline desire
  Burned itself into meteor freedom and spired
  Higher still, and saw the mountain-dividing
  Canyon of its captivity (that was to Cawdor
  Almost his world) like an old crack in a wall,
  Violet-shadowed and gold-lighted; the little stain
  Spilt on the floor of the crack was the strong forest;
  The grain of sand was the Rock.
  
  A speck, an atomic
  Center of power clouded in its own smoke
  Ran and cried in the crack; it was Cawdor; the other
  Points of humanity had neither weight nor shining
  To prick the eyes of even an eagle's passion.
  
  This burned and soared.
  
  The shining ocean below lay on the
  shore
  Like the great shield of the moon come down, rolling bright rim
  to rim with the earth.
  
  Against it the multiform
  And many-canyoned coast-range hills were gathered into one
  carven mountain, one modulated
  Eagle's cry made stone, stopping the strength of the sea.
  
  The
  beaked and winged effluence
  Felt the air foam under its throat and saw
  The mountain sun-cup Tassajara, where fawns
  Dance in the steam of the hot fountains at dawn,
  Smoothed out, and the high strained ridges beyond Cachagua,
  Where the rivers are born and the last condor is dead,
  Flatten, and a hundred miles toward morning the Sierras
  Dawn with their peaks of snow, and dwindle and smooth down
  On the globed earth.
  
  It saw from the height and desert space of
  unbreathable air
  Where meteors make green fire and die, the ocean dropping
  westward to the girdle of the pearls of dawn
  And the hinder edge of the night sliding toward Asia; it saw
  far under eastward the April-delighted
  Continent; and time relaxing about it now, abstracted from being,
  it saw the eagles destroyed,
  Mean generations of gulls and crows taking their world: turn
  for turn in the air, as on earth
  The white faces drove out the brown.
  
  It saw the white decayed
  and the brown from Asia returning;
  It saw men learn to outfly the hawk's brood and forget it again;
  it saw men cover the earth and again
  Devour each other and hide in caverns, be scarce as wolves.
  
  It
  neither wondered nor cared, and it saw
  Growth and decay alternate forever, and the tides returning.
  
  It saw, according to the sight of its kind, the archetype
  Body of life a beaked carnivorous desire
  Self-upheld on storm-broad wings: but the eyes
  Were spouts of blood; the eyes were gashed out; dark blood
  Ran from the ruinous eye-pits to the hook of the beak
  And rained on the waste spaces of empty heaven.
  
  Yet the great Life continued; yet the great Life
  Was beautiful, and she drank her defeat, and devoured
  Her famine for food.
  
  There the eagle's phantom perceived
  Its prison and its wound were not its peculiar wretchedness,
  All that lives was maimed and bleeding, caged or in blindness,
  Lopped at the ends with death and conception, and shrewd
  Cautery of pain on the stumps to stifle the blood, but not
  Refrains for all that; life was more than its functions
  And accidents, more important than its pains and pleasures,
  A torch to burn in with pride, a necessary
  Ecstasy in the run of the cold substance,
  And scape-goat of the greater world.
  
  (But as for me,
  I have heard the summer dust crying to be born
  As much as ever flesh cried to be quiet.
  
  )
  Pouring itself on fulfilment the eagle's passion
  Left life behind and flew at the sun, its father.
  
  The great unreal talons took peace for prey
  Exultantly, their death beyond death; stooped upward, and struck
  Peace like a white fawn in a dell of fire.

• The Coast-Road Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A horseman high alone as an eagle on the spur of the mountain
  over Mirmas Canyon draws rein, looks down
  At the bridge-builders, men, trucks, the power-shovels, the teeming
  end of the new coast-road at the mountain's base.
  
  He sees the loops of the road go northward, headland beyond
  headland, into gray mist over Eraser's Point,
  He shakes his fist and makes the gesture of wringing a chicken's
  neck, scowls and rides higher.
  
  I too
  Believe that the life of men who ride horses, herders of cattle on
  the mountain pasture, plowers of remote
  Rock-narrowed farms in poverty and freedom, is a good life.
  
  At
  the far end of those loops of road
  Is what will come and destroy it, a rich and vulgar and bewildered
  civilization dying at the core,
  A world that is feverishly preparing new wars, peculiarly vicious
  ones, and heavier tyrannies, a strangely
  Missionary world, road-builder, wind-rider, educator, printer and
  picture-maker and broadcaster,
  So eager, like an old drunken whore, pathetically eager to impose
  the seduction of her fled charms
  On all that through ignorance or isolation might have escaped
  them.
  
  I hope the weathered horseman up yonder
  Will die before he knows what this eager world will do to his
  children.
  
  More tough-minded men
  Can repulse an old whore, or cynically accept her drunken kindnesses
  for what they are worth,
  But the innocent and credulous are soon corrupted.
  
  Where is our
  consolation?
  
  Beautiful beyond belief
  The heights glimmer in the sliding cloud, the great bronze gorge-cut
  sides of the mountain tower up invincibly,
  Not the least hurt by this ribbon of road carved on their sea-foot.

• The Cruel Falcon Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Contemplation would make a good life, keep it strict, only
  The eyes of a desert skull drinking the sun,
  Too intense for flesh, lonely
  Exultations of white bone;
  Pure action would make a good life, let it be sharp-
  Set between the throat and the knife.
  
  A man who knows death by heart
  Is the man for that life.
  
  In pleasant peace and security
  How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die.
  
  He shall look up above the stalled oxen
  Envying the cruel falcon,
  And dig under the straw for a stone
  To bruise himself on.
  
  562

• The Cycle Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The clapping blackness of the wings of pointed cormorants,
  the great indolent planes
  Of autumn pelicans nine or a dozen strung shorelong,
  But chiefly the gulls, the cloud-caligraphers of windy spirals
  before a storm,
  Cruise north and south over the sea-rocks and over
  That bluish enormous opal; very lately these alone, these and the
  clouds
  And westering lights of heaven, crossed it; but then
  A hull with standing canvas crept about Point Lobos .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  now
  all day long the steamers
  Smudge the opal's rim; often a seaplane troubles
  The sea-wind with its throbbing heart.
  
  These will increase, the
  others diminish; and later
  These will diminish; our Pacific has pastured
  The Mediterranean torch and passed it west across the fountains
  of the morning;
  And the following desolation that feeds on Crete
  Feed here; the clapping blackness of the wings of pointed cormorants,
  the great sails
  Of autumn pelicans, the gray sea-going gulls,
  Alone will streak the enormous opal, the earth have peace like the
  broad water, our blood's
  Unrest have doubled to Asia and be peopling
  Europe again, or dropping colonies at the morning star: what
  moody traveler
  Wanders back here, watches the sea-fowl circle
  The old sea-granite and cemented granite with one regard, and
  greets my ghost,
  One temper with the granite, bulking about here?

• The Day Is A Poem (September 19, 1939) Read Poem Log in to favourite

  This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we hear his voice.
  
  A man of genius: that is, of amazing
  Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child's soul,
  Heard clearly through the dog wrath, a sick child
  Wailing in Danzig; invoking destruction and wailing at it.
  
  Here, the day was extremely hot; about noon
  A south wind like a blast from hell's mouth spilled a slight rain
  On the parched land, and at five a light earthquake
  Danced the house, no harm done.
  
  Tonight I have been amusing myself
  Watching the blood-red moon droop slowly
  Into the black sea through bursts of dry lightning and distant thunder.
  
  Well: the day is a poem: but too much
  Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens,
  Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.

• The Dead To Clemenceau: Read Poem Log in to favourite

  NOVEMBER, 1929
  Come (we say) Clemenceau.
  
  Why should you live longer than others?
  
  The vacuum that sucked
  Us down, and the former stars, draws at you also.
  
  No wrench for a man near ninety.
  
  They were younger who crowded us out of distinction the year
  you drove them
  Like flies on a fire.
  
  We don't say it was wrong.
  
  We don't say it was right.
  
  These heavy choices are less than verbal, down here, to us dead.
  
  Never a thorn in the crown of greatness down here.
  
  Not even Wilson laments here
  The cuckoo brood of design.
  
  This is the cave you conjectured;
  Nothing in death, as nothing in life, surprises you.
  
  You were not surprised when France
  Put you aside, when the war was finished, as a sick man mending
  Puts aside the strong poison that turned his fever.
  
  You'd not be surprised to hear
  Your enemies praising your name and the Paris cannon applaud you;
  Not surprised, nor much pleased, nor envious of more.
  
  Your negative straightness of mind
  And bleached like a drowned man's cast-up thigh-bone by eroding age-
  Hardly required the clear corrections of death.

• The Deer Lay Down Their Bones Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I followed the narrow cliffside trail half way up the mountain
  Above the deep river-canyon.
  
  There was a little cataract crossed the path,
  flinging itself
  Over tree roots and rocks, shaking the jeweled fern-fronds, bright bubbling
  water
  Pure from the mountain, but a bad smell came up.
  
  Wondering at it I clam-
  bered down the steep stream
  Some forty feet, and found in the midst of bush-oak and laurel,
  Hung like a bird's nest on the precipice brink a small hidden clearing,
  Grass and a shallow pool.
  
  But all about there were bones Iying in the grass,
  clean bones and stinking bones,
  Antlers and bones: I understood that the place was a refuge for wounded
  deer; there are so many
  Hurt ones escape the hunters and limp away to lie hidden; here they have
  water for the awful thirst
  And peace to die in; dense green laurel and grim cliff
  Make sanctuary, and a sweet wind blows upward from the deep gorge.
  
  —I
  wish my bones were with theirs.
  
  But that's a foolish thing to confess, and a little cowardly.
  
  We know that life
  Is on the whole quite equally good and bad, mostly gray neutral, and can
  be endured
  To the dim end, no matter what magic of grass, water and precipice, and
  pain of wounds,
  Makes death look dear.
  
  We have been given life and have used it—not a
  great gift perhaps—but in honesty
  Should use it all.
  
  Mine's empty since my love died—Empty?
  
  The flame-
  haired grandchild with great blue eyes
  That look like hers?
  
  —What can I do for the child?
  
  I gaze at her and wonder
  what sort of man
  In the fall of the world .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I am growing old, that is the trouble.
  
  My chil-
  dren and little grandchildren
  Will find their way, and why should I wait ten years yet, having lived sixty-
  seven, ten years more or less,
  Before I crawl out on a ledge of rock and die snapping, like a wolf
  Who has lost his mate?
  
  —I am bound by my own thirty-year-old decision:
  who drinks the wine
  Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment
  New discovery may lie.
  
  The deer in that beautiful place lay down their
  bones: I must wear mine.

• The Epic Stars Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The heroic stars spending themselves,
  Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
  They must burn out at length like used candles;
  And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes.
  
  There is the stuff for an epic poem—
  This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle—
  We don't know enough, we'll never know.
  
  Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.

• The Excesses Of God Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
  Our God?
  
  For to be equal a need
  Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
  Rainbows over the rain
  And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
  On the domes of deep sea-shells,
  And make the necessary embrace of breeding
  Beautiful also as fire,
  Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
  Nor the birds without music:
  There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
  The extravagant kindness, the fountain
  Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
  If power and desire were perch-mates.
  
  Anonymous submission.

• The Eye Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
  The blue pool in the old garden,
  More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
  Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific—
  Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
  
  Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
  Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
  And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of
  faiths—
  Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan.
  
  Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
  plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
  Into pale sea—look west at the hill of water: it is half the
  planet:
  this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
  Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
  Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never
  close;
  this is the staring unsleeping
  Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.

• The Giant’s Ring Read Poem Log in to favourite

  BALLYLESSON, NEAR BELFAST
  Whoever is able will pursue the plainly
  False immortality of not having lived in vain but leaving some
  mark in the world.
  
  Secretly mocking at his own insanity
  He labors the same, he knows that no dead man's lip was ever
  curled in self-scorn,
  And immortality is for the dead.
  
  Jesus and Caesar out of the bricks of man's weakness, Washington
  out of the brittle
  Bones of man's strength built their memorials,
  This nameless chief of a knot of forgotten tribes in the Irish darkness
  used faithfuller
  Simpler materials: to diadem a hilltop
  That sees the long loughs and the Mourne Mountains, with a ring
  of enormous embankment, and to build
  In the center that great toad of a dolmen
  Piled up of ponderous basalt that sheds the centuries like raindrops.
  
  He drove the labor,
  And has earmarked already some four millenniums.
  
  His very presence is here, thick-bodied and brutish, a brutal and
  senseless will-power.
  
  Immortality?
  
  While Homer and Shakespeare are names,
  Not of men but verses, and the elder has not lived nor the
  younger will not, such treadings of time.
  
  Conclude that secular like Christian immortality's
  Too cheap a bargain: the name, the work or the soul: glass beads
  are the trade for savages.

• The Great Explosion Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
  
  It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
  Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
  
  It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
  dust clouds and nebulae
  Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one
  harbor, they stick in one lump
  And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no
  way to express that explosion; all that exists
  Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each
  other into all the sky, new universes
  Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae
  like charging spearmen again
  Invade emptiness.
  
  No wonder we are so fascinated with
  fireworks
  And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for
  the howling fireblast that we were born from.
  
  But the whole sum of the energies
  That made and contain the giant atom survives.
  
  It will
  gather again and pile up, the power and the glory—
  And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the
  whole universe beats like a heart.
  
  Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back
  and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
  The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His
  terrible life.
  
  He is beautiful beyond belief.
  
  And we, God's apes—or tragic children—share in the beauty.
  
  We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
  
  He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's
  Florence, no anthropoid God
  Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care
  and will never cease.
  
  Look at the seas there
  Flashing against this rock in the darkness—look at the
  tide-stream stars—and the fall of nations—and dawn
  Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to
  meet the sea.
  
  These are real and we see their beauty.
  
  The great explosion is probably only a metaphor—I know not
  —of faceless violence, the root of all things.

• The Great Sunset Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A flight of six heavy-motored bombing-planes
  Went over the beautiful inhuman ridges a straight course northward;
  the incident stuck itself in my memory
  More than a flight of band-tail pigeons might have done
  Because those wings of man and potential war seemed really intrusive
  above the remote canyon.
  
  They changed it; I cannot say they profaned it, but the memory
  All day remained like a false note in familiar music, and suggested
  no doubt
  The counter-fantasy that came to my eyes in the evening, on the
  ocean cliff.
  
  I came from the canyon twilight
  Exactly at sunset to the open shore, and felt like a sudden extension
  of consciousness the wild free light
  And biting north-wind.
  
  The cloud-sky had lifted from the western
  horizon and left a long yellow panel
  Between the slate-edge ocean and the eyelid cloud; the smoky
  ball of the sun rolled on the sea-line
  And formless bits of vapor flew across, but when the sun was
  down
  The panel of clear sky brightened, the rags of moving cloud took
  memorable shapes, dark on the light,
  Whether I was dreaming or not, they became spears and war-axes,
  horses and sabres, gaunt battle-elephants
  With towered backs; they became catapults and siege-guns, high-tilted
  howitzers, long tractors, armored and turreted;
  They became battleships and destroyers, and great fleets of warplanes
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  all the proud instruments
  Of man imposing his will upon weaker men: they were like a
  Roman triumph, but themselves the captives,
  A triumph in reverse: all the tools of victory
  Whiffed away on the north-wind into a cloud like a conflagration,
  swept from the earth, no man
  From this time on to exploit nor subdue any other man.
  
  I thought,
  "What a pity our kindest dreams
  Are complete liars," and turned from the glowing west toward
  the cold twilight.
  
  "To be truth-bound, the neutral
  Detested by all the dreaming factions, is my errand here.
  
  '

• The Loving Shepherdess Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  The little one-room schoolhousc among the redwoods
  Opened its door, a dozen children ran out
  And saw on the narrow road between the dense trees
  A persona girl by the long light-colored hair:
  The torn brown cloak that she wore might be a man's
  Or woman's either-walking hastily northward
  Among a huddle of sheep.
  
  Her thin young face
  Seemed joyful, and lighted from inside, and formed
  Too finely to be so wind-burnt.
  
  As she went forward
  One or another of the trotting sheep would turn
  Its head to look at her face, and one would press
  Its matted shoulder against her moving thigh.
  
  The schoolchildren stood laughing and shouting together.
  
  "Who's that?
  
  " "Clare Walker," they said, "down from the hill.
  
  She'd fifty sheep and now she's got eight, nine,
  Ten: what have you done with all the others, Clare Walker?
  
  "
  The joy that had lived in her face died, she yet
  Went on as if she were deaf, with forward eyes
  And lifted head, but the delicate lips moving.
  
  The jeering children ran in behind her, and the sheep
  Drew nervously on before, except the old ram,
  That close at her side dipped his coiled horns a little
  But neither looked back nor edged forward.
  
  An urchin shouted
  "You killed your daddy, why don't you kill your sheep?
  
  "
  And a fat girl, "Oh where's your lover, Clare Walker?
  
  He didn't want you after all.
  
  "
  The patriarch ram
  That walked beside her wore a greasy brown bundle
  Tied on his back with cords in the felt of wool,
  And one of the little boys, running by, snatched at it
  So that it fell.
  
  Clare bent to gather it fallen,
  And tears dropped from her eyes.
  
  She offered no threat
  With the bent staff of rosy-barked madrone-wood
  That lay in her hand, but said "Oh please, Oh please,"
  As meek as one of her ewes.
  
  An eight-year-old girl
  Shrilled, "Whistle for the dogs, make her run like a cat,
  Call your dog, Charlie Geary!" But a brown-skinned
  Spanish-Indian boy came forward and said,
  "You let her alone.
  
  They'll not hurt you, Clare Walker.
  
  Don't cry, I'll walk beside you.
  
  " She thanked him, still crying.
  
  Four of the children, who lived southward, turned back;
  The rest followed more quietly.
  
  The black-haired boy
  Said gently, "Remember to keep in the road, Clare Walker.
  
  There's enough grass.
  
  The ranchers will sick their dogs on you
  If you go into the pastures, because their cows
  Won't eat where the sheep have passed; but you can walk
  Into the woods.
  
  " She answered, "You're kind, you're kind.
  
  Oh yes, I always remember.
  
  " The small road dipped
  Under the river when they'd come down the hill,
  A shallow mountain river that Clare skipped over
  By stone after stone, the sheep wading beside her.
  
  The friendly boy went south to the farm on the hill, "good-by,
  good-by," and Clare with her little flock
  Kept northward among great trees like towers in the river-valley.
  
  Her sheep sidled the path, snifHng
  The bitter sorrel, lavender-flowering in shade, and the withered
  ferns.
  
  Toward evening they found a hollow
  Of autumn grass.
  
  II
  Clare laughed and was glad, she undid the bundle
  from the ram's back
  And found in the folds a battered metal cup and a broken loaf.
  
  She shared her bread with the sheep,
  A morsel for each, and prettily laughing
  Pushed down the reaching faces.
  
  "Piggies, eat grass.
  
  Leave me the
  crust, Tiny, I can't eat grass.
  
  Nosie, keep off.
  
  Here Frannie, here Frannie.
  
  " One of the ewes
  came close and stood to be milked, Clare stroked
  The little udders and drank when the cup filled, and filled it again
  and drank, dividing her crust
  With the milch ewe; the flock wandered the glade, nibbling white
  grass.
  
  There was only one lamb among them,
  The others had died in the spring storm.
  
  The light in the glade
  suddenly increased and changed, the hill
  High eastward began to shine and be rosy-colored, and bathed
  in so clear a light that up the bare hill
  Each clump of yucca stood like a star, bristling sharp rays; while
  westward the spires of the giant wood
  Were strangely tall and intensely dark on the layered colors of
  the winter sundown; their blunt points touched
  The high tender blue, their heads were backed by the amber, the
  thick-branched columns
  Crossed flaming rose.
  
  Then Clare with the flush
  Of the solemn and glad sky on her face went lightly down to
  the river to wash her cup; and the flock
  Fed on a moment before they looked up and missed her.
  
  The
  ewe called Frannie had gone with Clare, and the others
  Heard Frannie's hooves on the crisp oak-leaves at the edge of the
  glade.
  
  They followed, bleating, and found their mistress
  On the brink of the stream, in the clear gloom of the wood, and
  nipped the cresses from the water.
  
  Thence all returning
  Lay down together in the glade, but Clare among them
  Sat combing her hair, with a gap-toothed comb brought from
  the bundle.
  
  The evening deepened, the thick blonde strands
  Hissed in the comb and glimmered in the brown twilight, Clare
  began weeping, full of sorrow for no reason
  As she had been full of happiness before.
  
  She braided her hair
  and pillowed her head on the bundle; she heard
  The sheep breathing about her and felt the warmth of their
  bodies, through the heavy fleeces.
  
  In the night she moaned
  And bolted upright.
  
  "Oh come, come,
  Come Fern, come Frannie, Leader and Saul and Tiny,
  We have to go on," she whispered, sobbing with fear, and stood
  With a glimmer in her hair among the sheep rising.
  
  The halved
  moon had arisen clear of the hill,
  And touched her hair, and the hollow, in the mist from the river,
  was a lake of whiteness.
  
  Clare stood wreathed with her
  flock
  And stared at the dark towers of the wood, the dream faded
  away from her mind, she sighed and fondled
  The frightened foreheads.
  
  "Lie down, lie down darlings, we
  can't escape it.
  
  " But after that they were restless
  And heard noises in the night nil dawn.
  
  They rose in the quivering
  Pale clearness before daylight, Clare milked her ewe,
  The others feeding drifted across the glade
  Like little clouds at sunrise wandering apart;
  She lifted up the madrone-wood staff and called them.
  
  "Fay, Fern, Oh Frannie.
  
  Come Saul.
  
  Leader and Tiny and Nosie, we have to go on.
  
  "
  They went to the stream and then returned to the road
  And very slowly went north, nibbling the margin
  Bushes and grass, tracking the tender dust
  With numberless prints of oblique crossings and driftings.
  
  They came to Fogler's place and two ruffian dogs
  Flew over the fence: Clare screaming "Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,"
  An inarticulate wildbird cry, brandishing
  The staff but never striking, stood out against them,
  That dashed by her, and the packed and trembling ball
  Of fleeces rolling into the wood was broken.
  
  The sheep might have been torn there, some ewe or the lamb
  Against the great foundations of the trees, but Fogler
  Ran shouting over the road after his dogs
  And drove them home.
  
  Clare gathered her flock, the sobbing
  Throats and the tired eyes, "Fay, Fern, Oh Frannie,
  Come Leader, come little Hornie, come Saul"; and Fogler:
  "You ought to get a good dog to help take care of them.
  
  "
  He eyed curiously her thin young face,
  Pale parted lips cracked by the sun and wind,
  And then the thin bare ankles and broken shoes.
  
  "Are you Clare Walker?
  
  I heard that you'd gone away:
  But you're Clare Walker, aren't you?
  
  " "We had a dog,"
  She said, "a long time ago but he went away.
  
  There, Nosie.
  
  Poor Frannie.
  
  There.
  
  These poor things
  Can find their food, but what could I keep a dog with?
  
  But that was some years ago.
  
  " He said, "Are these all?
  
  They're all gathered?
  
  I heard you'd thirty or forty.
  
  "
  Then hastily, for he saw the long hazel eyes
  Filling with tears, "Where are you going, Clare Walker?
  
  Because I think it will rain in a week or two,
  You can't sleep out then.
  
  " She answered with a little shudder,
  "Wherever I go this winter will be all right.
  
  I'm going somewhere next April.
  
  " Fogler stood rubbing
  His short black beard, then dropped his hand to scratch
  The ram's forehead by the horns but Saul drew away.
  
  And Fogler said: "You're too young and too pretty
  To wander around the country like this.
  
  I'd ask you to come here when it rains, but my wife .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And how could I keep the sheep here?
  
  " "Ah, no," she answered,
  "I couldn't come back.
  
  " "Well, wait," he said, "for a minute,
  Until I go to the house.
  
  Will you wait, Clare?
  
  I'll tie up the dogs.
  
  I've got some biscuit and things .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  He returned with a sack of food, and two old shoes
  A little better than Clare's.
  
  She sat on a root;
  He knelt before her, fumbling the knotted laces
  Of those she had on, and she felt his hands tremble.
  
  His wife's shoes were too short for the slender feet.
  
  When the
  others
  Had been replaced, Fogler bent suddenly and kissed
  Clare's knee, where the coat had slipped back.
  
  He looked at her
  face,
  His own burning, but in hers nor fear nor laughter,
  Nor desire nor aversion showed.
  
  He said "good-by,"
  And hurried away.
  
  Clare travelled northward, and sometimes
  Half running, more often loitering, and the sheep fed.
  
  In the afternoon she led them into the willows,
  And choosing a green pool of the shallow stream
  Bathed, while the sheep bleated to her from the shoals.
  
  They made a pleasant picture, the girl and her friends, in the
  green shade
  Shafted with golden light falling through the alder branches.
  
  Her body, the scarecrow garments laid by,
  Though hermit-ribbed and with boyishly flattened flanks hardly
  a woman's,
  Was smooth and flowing, glazed with bright water, the shoulders
  and breasts beautiful, and moved with a rapid confidence
  That contradicted her mind's abstractions.
  
  She laughed aloud
  and jetted handfuls of shining water
  At the sheep on the bank; the old ram stood blinking with pleasure,
  shaking his horns.
  
  But after a time Clare's mood
  Was changed, as if she thought happiness must end.
  
  She shivered and moved heavily out of the stream
  And wept on the shore, her hands clasping her ankles,
  Her face bowed on her knees, her knotted-up coils
  Of citron-colored hair loosening.
  
  The ewe
  That she called Nosie approached behind her and pressed
  Her chin on the wet shoulder; Clare turned then, moaning,
  And drew the bony head against the soft breasts.
  
  "Oh what will you do," she whispered laughing and sobbing,
  "When all this comes to an end?
  
  "
  She stood and stroked off
  The drops of water, and dressed hastily.
  
  They went
  On farther; now there was no more forest by the road,
  But open fields.
  
  The river bent suddenly westward
  And made a pond that shone like a red coal
  Against the shore of the ocean, under the sundown
  Sky, with a skeleton of sandbar
  Between the pond and the sea.
  
  When deepening twilight
  Made all things gray and made trespass safe, Clare entered
  The seaward fields with her flock.
  
  They had fed scantly
  In the redwood forest, and here on the dead grass
  The cattle had cropped all summer they could not sleep.
  
  She led them hour after hour under the still stars.
  
  Once they ran down to the glimmering beach to avoid
  The herd and the range bull; they returned, and wandered
  The low last bluff, where sparse grass labors to live in the windheaped
  sand.
  
  Silently they pastured northward,
  Gray file of shadows, between the glimmer and hushing moan
  of the ocean and the dark silence of the hills.
  
  The erect one wore a pallor of starlight woven in her hair.
  
  Before
  moonrise they huddled together
  In a hollow cup of old dune that opened seaward, but sheltered
  them from the nightwind and from morning eyes.
  
  III
  The bleating of sheep answered the barking of sea-lions and Clare
  awoke
  Dazzled in the broad dawn.
  
  The land-wind lifted the light-spun
  manes of the waves, a drift of sea-lions
  Swung in the surf and looked at the shore, sleek heads uplifted
  and great brown eyes with a glaze of blind
  Blue sea-light in them.
  
  "You lovely creatures," she whispered.
  
  She went to the verge and felt the foam at her ankles.
  
  "You lovely
  creatures come closer.
  
  " The sheep followed her
  And stopped in the sand with lonesome cries.
  
  Clare stood and
  trembled at the simple morning of the world; there was
  nothing
  But hills and sea, not a tree on the shore nor a ship on the sea;
  an edge of the hill kindled with gold,
  And the sun rose.
  
  Then Clare took home her soul from the world
  and went on.
  
  When she was wandering the flats
  Of open pasture between the Sur Hill sea-face and the great
  separate sea-dome rock at Point Sur,
  Forgetting, as often before, that she and her flock were trespassers
  In cattle country: she looked and a young cowboy rode down
  from the east.
  
  "You'll have to get off this range.
  
  Get out of this field," he said, "your tallow-hoofed mutton.
  
  "
  "Oh," she answered trembling, "I'm going.
  
  I got lost in the
  night.
  
  Don't drive them.
  
  " "A woman?
  
  " he said.
  
  He jerked the reins and
  sat staring.
  
  "Where did you drop from?
  
  " She answered
  faintly,
  With a favor-making smile, "From the south.
  
  " "Who's with
  you?
  
  " "Nobody.
  
  "
  "Keep going, and get behind the hill if you can
  Before Nick Miles the foreman looks down this way.
  
  "
  She said to the ram, "Oh Saul, Oh hurry.
  
  Come Leader.
  
  Tiny and Frannie and Nosie, we have to go on.
  
  Oh, hurry, Fern.
  
  " They huddled bleating about her,
  And she in the midst made haste; they pressed against her
  And moved in silence.
  
  The young cowboy rode on the east
  As hoping to hide the flock from Nick Miles his foreman,
  Sidelong in the saddle, and gazed at Clare, at the twisting
  Ripple of pale bright hair from her brown skin
  Behind the temples.
  
  She felt that his looks were friendly,
  She turned and timidly smiled.
  
  Then she could see
  That he was not a man but a boy, sixteen
  Or seventeen; she felt more courage.
  
  "What would your foreman
  Do if he saw us?
  
  " "He'd be rough.
  
  But," he said,
  "You'll soon be behind the hill.
  
  Where are you going?
  
  "
  She made no answer.
  
  "To Monterey?
  
  " "Oh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  to nowhere!"
  She shivered and sought his face with her eyes.
  
  "To nowhere,
  I mean.
  
  "
  "Well," he said sulkily, "where did you sleep last night?
  
  Somewhere?
  
  " She said with eagerness, "Ah, two miles back,
  On the edge of the sand; we weren't really in the field.
  
  "
  He stared.
  
  "You're a queer one.
  
  Is that old coat
  All you've got on?
  
  " "No, no, there's a dress under it.
  
  But scrubbed so often," she said, "with sand and water
  Because I had no soap, it's nothing but rags.
  
  "
  "You needn't hurry, no one can see you now.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  My name's Will Brighton," he said.
  
  "Well, mine is dare.
  
  "
  "Where do you live when you're at home, Clare?
  
  " "I haven't any.
  
  "
  They rounded the second spur of the hill.
  
  Gray lupine clothed
  the north flank, a herd of cattle stared down
  From the pale slope of dead grass above the gray thicket.
  
  Rumps
  high, low quarters, they were part of the world's end sag,
  The inverted arch from the Sur Hill height to the flat foreland
  and up the black lava rock of Point Sur;
  In the open gap the mountain sea-wall of the world foam-footed
  went northward.
  
  Beyond the third spur Clare saw
  A barn and a house up the wrinkled hill, oak-scrub and sycamores.
  
  The house built of squared logs, time-blackened,
  Striped with white plaster between the black logs, a tall dead
  cube with a broken chimney, made her afraid;
  Its indestructible crystalline shape.
  
  "Oh! There's a house.
  
  They'll see us from there.
  
  I'll go back .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "Don't be afraid,"
  He answered smiling, "that place has no eyes.
  
  There you can turn your sheep in the old corral,
  Or graze them under the buckeyes until evening.
  
  No one will come.
  
  " She sighed, and then faintly:
  "Nobody ever lives there, you're sure?
  
  " "Not for eight years.
  
  You can go in," he said nervously: "maybe
  You haven't been inside a house a good while?
  
  "
  She looked up at his pleasant unformed young face,
  It was blushing hot.
  
  "Oh, what's the matter with the house?
  
  "
  "Nothing.
  
  Our owner bought the ranch, and the house
  Stands empty, he didn't want it.
  
  They tell me an old man
  Claiming to be God .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  a kind of a preacher boarded there,
  And the family busted up.
  
  " She said "I don't believe
  Any such story.
  
  " "Well, he was kind of a preacher.
  
  They say his girl killed herself; he washed his hands
  With fire and vanished.
  
  " "Then she was crazy.
  
  What, spill
  Her own one precious life," she said trembling,
  "She'd nothing but that?
  
  Ah! no!
  No matter how miserable, what goes in a moment,
  You know .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  out .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Her head bowed, and her hand
  Dug anxiously in the deep pads of wool
  On the shoulder of the ram walking against her side;
  When her face lifted again even the unwatchful boy
  Took notice of tears.
  
  They approached the house; the fence in
  front was broken but the windows and doors were whole,
  The rose that grew over the rotted porch steps was dead; yet
  the sleep of the house seemed incorruptible,
  It made Clare and the boy talk low.
  
  He dropped out of the
  saddle and made the bridle hang down
  To serve for tether.
  
  "Come round by the back," he whispered,
  "this door is locked.
  
  " "What for?
  
  " "To go in," he whispered.
  
  "Ah no, I have to stay with my sheep.
  
  Why in the world should
  I go in to your dirty old house?
  
  "
  His face now he'd dismounted was level with hers; she saw the
  straw-colored hairs on his lip, and freckles,
  For he'd grown pale.
  
  "Hell," he said, narrowing his eyes, hoping
  to be manly and bully her: but the heart failed him,
  He said sadly, "I hoped you'd come in.
  
  " She breathed, "Oh," her
  mouth twitching,
  But whether with fear or laughter no one could tell,
  And said, "You've been kind.
  
  Does nobody ever come here?
  
  Because I'd have to leave my poor friends outdoors,
  Someone might come and hurt them.
  
  " "The sheep?
  
  Oh, nobody
  No one can see them.
  
  Oh, Clare, come on.
  
  Look here,"
  He ran and opened a gate, "the corral fence
  Is good as new and the grass hasn't been touched.
  
  "
  The small flock entered gladly and found green weeds
  In the matted gray.
  
  Clare slowly returned.
  
  The boy
  Catching her by the hand to draw her toward the house,
  She saw his young strained face, and wondered.
  
  "Have you ever
  Been, with a woman?
  
  " "Ah," he said proudly, "yes.
  
  "
  But the honesty of her gaze dissolving his confidence
  He looked at the ground and said mournfully, "She wasn't white.
  
  And I think she was quite old .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Clare in her turn
  Reddened.
  
  "If it would make you happy," she said.
  
  "I want to leave glad memories.
  
  And you'll not be sorry
  After I'm gone?
  
  "
  The sheep, missing their mistress,
  Bleated and moved uneasily, forgetting to feed,
  While Clare walked in the house.
  
  She said, "Oh, not yet.
  
  Let's look at the house.
  
  What was the man's name
  Whose daughter .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  he said he was God and suddenly vanished?
  
  "
  "A man named Barclay," he said, "kind of a preacher.
  
  "
  They spoke in whispers, peering about.
  
  At length Clare sighed,
  And stripped off the long brown coat.
  
  When they returned outdoors,
  Blinking in the sun, the boy bent his flushed face
  Toward Clare's pale one and said, "Dear, you can stay here
  As long as you want, but I must go back to work.
  
  "
  She heard the sheep bleating, and said, "Good-by.
  
  Good luck, Will Brighton.
  
  " She hurried to her flock, while he
  Mounted, but when he had ridden three strides of a canter
  Clare was crying, "Oh help.
  
  Oh help.
  
  Oo! Oo!" He returned,
  And found her in the near corner of the corral
  On hands and knees, her flock huddling about her,
  Peering down a pit in the earth.
  
  Oak-scrub and leafless
  Buckeyes made a dark screen toward the hill, and Clare
  Stood up against it, her white face and light hair
  Shining against it, and cried, "Oh, help me, they've fallen,
  Two have fallen.
  
  " The pit was an old well;
  The hand-pump had fallen in, and the timbers
  That closed the mouth had crumbled to yellow meal.
  
  Clare lay and moaned on the brink among the dark nettles,
  Will Brighton brought the braided line that hung at his saddle
  And made it fast and went down.
  
  The well-shaft was so filled up
  With earth-fall and stones and rotting timbers, it was possible
  for the boy and girl to hoist up the fallen
  Without other contrivance than the looped rope.
  
  The one came
  smiiHriiiur and sobbing, Clare cried her name,
  "Oh, Fern, Fern, Fern.
  
  " She stood and fell, and scrambled up to
  her feet, and plunged on three legs.
  
  The other
  Came flaccid, it slipped in the rope and hung head downward,
  Clare made no cry.
  
  When it was laid by the well-brink
  A slime of half-chewed leaves fell from its mouth.
  
  The boy
  climbed up.
  
  "While I was making your pleasure,"
  Clare said, "this came.
  
  While I was lying there.
  
  What's punished
  is kindness.
  
  " He touched the lifeless ewe with his foot,
  Clare knelt against her and pushed him away.
  
  He said, "It fell the
  first and its neck was broken.
  
  " And Clare:
  "This was the one that would nudge my hands
  When I was quiet, she'd come behind me and touch me, I called
  her Nosie.
  
  One night we were all near frozen
  And starved, I felt her friendly touches all night.
  
  " She lifted the
  head.
  
  "Oh, Nosie, I loved you best.
  
  Fern's leg is broken.
  
  We'll all be like you in a little while.
  
  " The
  boy ran and caught Fern, and said
  "The bones are all right.
  
  A sprain I guess, a bad sprain.
  
  I'll come
  in the evening, Clare, if you're still here.
  
  I'm sorry.
  
  " She sat with the head on her lap, and he rode away.
  
  After a time she laid it on the earth.
  
  She went and felt Fern's foreleg and went slowly up the hill; her
  small flock followed.
  
  IV
  Fern lagged and lagged,
  Dibbling the dust with the mere points of the hoof
  Of the hurt foreleg, and rolling up to her shepherdess
  The ache of reproachful eyes.
  
  "Oh, Fern, Oh, Fern,
  What can I do?
  
  I'm not a man, to be able to carry you.
  
  My father, he could have carried you.
  
  " Tears from Clare's eyes
  Fell in the roadway; she was always either joyful or weeping.
  
  They climbed for half the day, only a steep mile
  With many rests, and lay on the Sur Hill summit.
  
  The sun and the ocean were far down below, like fire in a bowl;
  The shadow of the hills lay slanting up a thin mist
  Into the eastern sky, dark immense lines
  Going out of the world.
  
  Clare slept wretchedly, for thirst
  And anxious dreams and sorrow.
  
  She saw the lighthouse
  Glow and flash all night under the hill;
  The wind turned south, she smelled the river they had left,
  Small flying clouds from the south crossed the weak stars.
  
  In the morning Fern would not walk.
  
  Between noon and morning
  A dark-skinned man on a tall hammer-headed
  Flea-bitten gray horse rode north on the hill-crest.
  
  Clare ran to meet him.
  
  "Please help me.
  
  One of my sheep
  Has hurt her leg and can't walk.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Entiendes ingles?
  
  "
  She faltered, seeing him Indian-Spanish, and the dark eyes
  Gave no sign whether they understood, gazing through her with
  a blue light across them
  Like the sea-lions' eyes.
  
  He answered easily in English, "What can
  I do?
  
  " in the gentle voice of his people;
  And Clare: "I thought you might carry her down.
  
  We are very
  thirsty, the feed is all dry, here is no water,
  And I've been gathering the withered grasses to feed her.
  
  " He
  said, "We could tie her onto the horse.
  
  " "Ah, no,
  She'd be worse hurt.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  She's light and little, she was born in
  the hills.
  
  " The other sheep had followed their shepherdess
  Into the road and sadly looked up, the man smiled and dismounted
  among them.
  
  "Where are you going?
  
  "
  She answered, "North.
  
  Oh, come and see her.
  
  Unless you carry her
  I don't know what we can do.
  
  " "But it's two miles
  Down to the river.
  
  " The lame ewe, whether frightened
  By the stranger and his horse, or rested at length,
  Now rose and went quietly to Clare, the hurt foreleg
  Limping but serving.
  
  Clare laughed with pleasure.
  
  "Oh, now,
  We can go down by ourselves.
  
  Come Fern, come Saul,
  Fay, Frannie, Leader .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " She was about to have called
  The name of the one that died yesterday; her face
  Changed and she walked in silence, Fern at her thigh.
  
  The friendly stranger walked on the other side,
  And his horse followed the sheep.
  
  He said: "I have seen
  Many things, of this world and the others, but what are you?
  
  "
  "My name's Clare Walker.
  
  " "Well, I am Onorio Vasquez.
  
  I meant, what are you doing?
  
  I think that I'd have seen you or
  heard of you
  If you live near.
  
  " "I'm doing?
  
  I'm taking care of my sheep.
  
  " She
  looked at his face to be sure of kindness,
  And said, "I'm doing like most other people; take care of those
  that need me and go on till I die.
  
  But I know when it will be; that's the only .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I'm often
  afraid.
  
  " Her look went westward to the day moon,
  Faint white shot bird in her wane, the wings bent downward,
  falling in the clear over the ocean cloud-bank.
  
  "Most people will see hundreds of moons: I shall see five.
  
  When this one's finished.
  
  " Vasquez looked intently at her thin
  young face, turned sideways from him, the parted
  Sun-scarred lips, the high bridge of the nose, dark eyes and light
  hair; she was thin, but no sign of sickness; her eyes
  Met his and he looked down and said nothing.
  
  When he looked
  down he remembered chiefly the smooth brown throat
  And the little hollow over the notch of the breast-bone.
  
  He said
  at length, carefully, "You needn't be afraid.
  
  I often," he murmured shyly, "have visions.
  
  I used to think they
  taught me something, but I was a fool.
  
  If you saw a vision, or you heard a voice from heaven, it is nothing.
  
  "
  She answered, "What I fear really's the pain.
  
  The rest is only a kind of strangeness.
  
  " Her eyes were full of tears
  and he said anxiously, "Oh, never
  Let visions nor voices fool you.
  
  They are wonderful but we see them by chance; I think they
  mean something in their own country but they mean
  Nothing in this; they have nothing to do with our lives and
  deaths.
  
  " She answered in so changed a voice that Vasquez
  Stared; the tears were gone and her eyes were laughing.
  
  "Oh,
  no, it was nothing," she said, "in the way of that.
  
  Visions?
  
  My trouble is a natural thing.
  
  But tell me about those visions.
  
  " He muttered to himself
  With a shamed face and answered, "Not now.
  
  " The south wind
  That drove the dust of the little troop before them
  Now increased and struck hard, where the road gained
  A look-out point over the fork of the canyon
  And the redwood forest below.
  
  The sheep were coughing
  In the whirl of wind.
  
  At this point the lame ewe
  Lay down and refused to rise, "Oh, now, now, now,"
  Clare wrung her hands, "we're near the water too.
  
  We're all so thirsty.
  
  Oh, Fern!" Vasquez said sadly, "If she'd be quiet
  Over my shoulders, but she won't.
  
  " He heard a hoarse voice
  Cry in the canyon, and Clare softly cried answer
  And ran to the brink of the road.
  
  She stood there panting
  Above the pitch and hollow of the gorge, her grotesque cloak
  Blown up to her shoulders, flapping like wings
  About the half nakedness of the slender body.
  
  Vasquez looked down the way of her gaze, expecting
  To see some tragical thing; he saw nothing but a wide heron
  Laboring thwart wind from the shore over the heads of the redwoods.
  
  A heavy dark hawk balanced in the storm
  And suddenly darted; the heron, the wings and long legs wavering
  in terror, fell, screaming, the long throat
  Twisted under the body; Clare screamed in answer.
  
  The pirate
  death drove by and had missed, and circled
  For a new strike, the poor frightened fisherman
  Beat the air over the heads of the redwoods and labored upward.
  
  Again and again death struck, and the heron
  Fell, with the same lost cry, and escaped; but the last fall
  Was into the wood, the hawk followed, both passed from sight
  Under the waving spires of the wood.
  
  Clare Walker
  Turned, striving with the gesture of a terrified child
  To be quiet, her clenched fist pressed on her mouth,
  Her teeth against the knuckles, and her blonde hair
  Wild on the wind.
  
  "Oh, what can save him, can save him?
  
  Oh, how he cried at each fall!" She crouched in the wind
  At the edge of the road, trembling; the ewe called Tiny
  Crossed over and touched her, the others turned anxious looks
  From sniffing the autumn-pinched leaves of the groundling blackberries.
  
  When she was quieted Vasquez said, "You love
  All creatures alike.
  
  " She looked at his face inquiringly
  With wide candid brown eyes, either not knowing
  Or not thinking.
  
  He said, "It is now not far
  Down to the running water; we'd better stretch her
  Across the saddle" he nodded toward the lame ewe
  "You hold her by the forelegs and I by the hind ones,
  She'll not be hurt.
  
  " Clare's voice quieted the sheep
  And Vasquez' the indignant horse.
  
  They came down at length
  To dark water under gigantic trees.
  
  V
  She helped Fern drink before herself drooped eagerly
  Her breast against the brown stones and kissed the cold stream.
  
  She brought from the bundle what food remained, and shared it
  With Vasquez and the munching sheep.
  
  There were three apples
  From Fogler's trees, and a little jar of honey
  And crumbled comb from his hives, and Clare drew a net
  Of water-cress from the autumn-hushed water to freshen
  The old bread and the broken biscuits.
  
  She was gay with delight
  At having something to give.
  
  They sat on the bank, where century
  After century of drooping redwood needles had made the earth,
  as if the dark trees were older
  Than their own mother.
  
  Clare answered Vasquez' question and
  said she had come from the coast mountains in the south;
  She'd left her home a long time ago; and Fogler, the farmer by
  the Big Sur, had given her this food
  Because he was sorry his dogs had worried the sheep.
  
  But yesterday
  she was passing Point Sur, and Fern
  Had fallen into a well by the house.
  
  She said nothing of the other
  ewe, that had died; and Vasquez
  Seemed to clench himself tight: "What were you doing at Point
  Sur, it's not on the road?
  
  " "The sheep were hungry,
  And I wandered off the road in the dark.
  
  It was wicked of me
  to walk in the pasture, but a young cowboy
  Helped me on the right way.
  
  We looked into the house.
  
  " He
  said, "Let no one go back there, let its mice have it.
  
  God lived there once and tried to make peace with the people;
  no peace was made.
  
  " She stared in silence, and Vasquez:
  "After that time I bawled for death, like a calf for the cow.
  
  There
  were no visions.
  
  My brothers watched me,
  And held me under the hammers of food and sleep.
  
  "
  He ceased; then Clare in a troubled silence
  Thought he was lying, for she thought certainly that no one
  Ever had desired death.
  
  But, for he looked unhappy
  And said nothing, she said Will Brighton had told her
  Something about a man who claimed to be God,
  "Whose daughter," she said, "died.
  
  " Vasquez stood up
  And said trembling, "In the ruin of San Antonio church
  I saw an owl as big as one of your sheep
  Sleeping above the little gilt Virgin above the altar.
  
  That was no vision.
  
  I want to hear nothing
  Of what there was at Point Sur.
  
  " He went to his horse
  That stood drooping against the stream-bank, and rode
  The steep soft slope between the broad butts of trees.
  
  But, leaving the undisturbed air of the wood
  For the rough wind of the roadway, he stopped and went back.
  
  "It will rain," he said.
  
  "You ought to think of yourself.
  
  The wind is digging water since we came down.
  
  My father's place is too far.
  
  There's an old empty cabin
  A short ways on.
  
  " She had been crouching again
  Over the stream to drink, and rose with wet lips
  But answered nothing.
  
  Vasquez felt inwardly dizzy
  For no reason he knew, as if a gray bird
  Turned in his breast and flirted half-open wings
  Like a wild pigeon bathing.
  
  He said, "You'll see it
  Above the creek on the right hand of the road
  Only a little way north.
  
  " He turned and rode back,
  Hearing her call "Good-by," into the wind on the road.
  
  This man was that Onorio Vasquez
  Who used to live on Palo Corona mountain
  With his father and his six brothers, but now they lived
  Up Mill Creek Canyon beside the abandoned lime-kiln
  On land that was not their own.
  
  For yearly on this coast
  Taxes increase, land grows harder to hold,
  Poor people must move their places.
  
  Onorio had wealth
  Of visions, but those are not coinable.
  
  A power in his mind
  Was more than equal to the life he was born to,
  But fear, or narrowing fortune, had kept it shut
  From a larger life; the power wasted itself
  In making purposeless visions, himself perceived them
  To have no meaning relative to any known thing: but always
  They made him different from his brothers; they gave him
  A kind of freedom; they were the jewels and value of his life.
  
  So that when once, at a critical time, they failed
  And were not seen for a year, he'd hungered to die.
  
  That was nine years ago; his mind was now quieter,
  But still it found all its value in visions.
  
  Between them, he hired out his hands to the coast farms,
  Or delved the garden at home.
  
  Clare Walker, when he was gone, forgot him at once.
  
  She drank a third draught, then she dropped off her shoes
  And washed the dust from her feet.
  
  Poor Fern was now hobbling
  Among the others, and they'd found vines to feed on
  At the near edge of the wood, so that Clare felt
  Her shepherdess mind at peace, to throw off
  The coat and the rags and bathe in the slender stream,
  Flattening herself to find the finger's depth water.
  
  The water and the air were cold now, she rubbed her body
  Hastily dry with the bleached rags of her dress
  And huddled the cloak about her, but hung the other
  Over a branch to dry.
  
  Sadly she studied
  The broken shoes and found them useless at last,
  And flung them into the bushes.
  
  An hour later
  She resumed the dress, she called her flock to go on
  Northward.
  
  "Come Fern, come Frannie.
  
  Oh, Saul.
  
  Leader and Hoinie and Tiny, we have to go on.
  
  "
  VI
  The sky had blackened and the wind raised a dust
  When they came up to the road from the closed quiet of the wood,
  The sun was behind the hill but not down yet.
  
  Clare passed the
  lichen-plated abandoned cabin that Vasquez
  Had wished her to use, because there was not a blade of pasture
  about it, nothing but the shafted jealousy.
  
  And foodless possession of the great redwoods.
  
  She saw the gray
  bed of the Little Sur like a dry bone
  Through its winter willows, and on the left in the sudden
  Sea-opening V of the fcanyon the sun streaming through a cloud,
  the lank striped ocean, and an arched film
  Of sand blown from a dune at the stream's foot.
  
  The road ahead
  went over a bridge and up the bare hill
  In lightning zigzags; a small black bead came down the lightning,
  flashing at the turns in the strained light,
  A motor-car driven fast, Clare urged her flock into the ditch by
  the road, but the car turned
  This side the bridge and glided down a steep driveway.
  
  When Clare came and looked down she saw the farmhouse
  Beside the creek, and a hundred bee-hives and a leafless orchard,
  Crossed by the wheeling swords of the sun.
  
  A man with a gray mustache covering his mouth
  Stood by the road, Clare felt him stare at the sheep
  And stare at her bare feet, though his eyes were hidden
  In the dark of his face in the shadow of the turbid light.
  
  She smiled and murmured, "Good evening.
  
  " He giggled to himself
  Like a half-witted person and stared at her feet
  She passed, in the swirls of light and dust, the old man
  Followed and called, "Hey: Missy: where will you sleep?
  
  "
  "Why, somewhere up there," she answered.
  
  He giggled, "Eh, Eh!
  If I were you.
  
  Ho," he said joyfully,
  "If I were in your shoes, I'd look for a roof.
  
  It's big and bare, Serra Hill.
  
  You from the south?
  
  "
  "I've been in the rain before," she answered.
  
  She laid
  Her hand on a matted fleece.
  
  "I've got to find them
  Some feeding-place, they're hungry, they've been in the hungry
  Redwoods.
  
  " He stopped and peered and giggled: "One's lame,
  But," he said chuckling, "you could go on all night
  And never muddy your shoes.
  
  Ho, ho! Listen, Missy.
  
  You ain't a Mexican, I guess you've had bad luck.
  
  I'll fix you up in the hay-shed and you'll sleep dry,
  These fellows can feed all night.
  
  " "The owner," she said,
  "Wouldn't let me.
  
  They'd spoil the hay.
  
  " "The owner.
  
  Bless you, the poor old man's too busy to notice.
  
  Paying his debts.
  
  That was his sharp son
  Drove in just now.
  
  They hated the old man
  But now they come like turkey-buzzards to watch him die.
  
  "
  "Oh! Is he dying?
  
  " "Why, fairly comfortable.
  
  As well as you can expect.
  
  " "I think, we'll go on,"
  She murmured faintly.
  
  "Just as you like, Missy.
  
  But nobody cares whether you spoil the hay.
  
  There's plenty more in the barn, and all the stock’ll
  soon be cleared out.
  
  I don't work for his boys.
  
  Ho, it's begun already.
  
  " Some drops were flying, and the sun
  Drowned in a cloud, or had set, suddenly the light was twilight.
  
  The old man waved his hand in the wind
  Over the hives and the orchard.
  
  "This place," he giggled, "meant
  the world to old Warfield: Hey, watch them sell.
  
  It means a shiny new car to each of the boys.
  
  " He shot up the
  collar of his coat, and the huddling sheep
  Tucked in their rumps; the rain on a burst of wind, small drops
  but many.
  
  The sheep looked up at their mistress,
  Who said, feeling the drift like needles on her cheek, and cold drops
  Run down by her shoulder, "If nobody minds, you think, about
  our lying in the hay.
  
  " "Hell no, come in.
  
  Only you'll have to be out in the gray to-morrow, before the
  sharp sons get up.
  
  " He led her about
  By the bridge, through the gapped fence, not to be seen from the house.
  
  The hay-shed was well roofed, and walled southward
  Against the usual drive of the rain.
  
  Clare saw in the twilight
  Wealth of fodder and litter, and was glad, and the sheep
  Entered and fed.
  
  After an hour the old man
  Returned, with a smell of fried grease in the gray darkness.
  
  Clare rose to meet him, she thought he was bringing food,
  But the odor was but a relic of his own supper.
  
  "It's raining," he said; as if she could fail to hear
  The hissing drift on the roof; "you'd be cosy now
  On Serra Hill.
  
  " He paused and seemed deeply thoughtful,
  And said, "But still you could walk all night and never
  Get your shoes wet.
  
  Ho, ho! You're a fine girl,
  How do you come to be on the road?
  
  Eh?
  
  Trouble?
  
  "
  "I'm going north.
  
  You're kind," she said, "people are kind.
  
  "
  "Why, yes, I'm a kind man.
  
  Well, now, sleep cosy.
  
  "
  He reached into the dark and touched her, she stood
  Quietly and felt his hand.
  
  A dog was heard barking
  Through the hiss of rain.
  
  He said, "There's that damn' dog.
  
  I tied him up after I let you in,
  Now he'll be yelling all night.
  
  " The old man stumped off
  Into the rain, then Clare went back to her sheep
  And burrowed in the hay amongst them.
  
  The old man returned
  A second time; Clare was asleep and she felt
  The sheep lifting their heads to stare at his lantern.
  
  "Oh! What do you want?
  
  " "Company, company," he muttered.
  
  "They've got an old hatchet-faced nurse in the house .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But he's been dying for a month, he makes me nervous.
  
  The boys don't mind, but I’m nervous.
  
  " He kicked
  One of the sheep to make it rise and make room,
  Clare murmured sadly, "Don't hurt them.
  
  " He sat in the hay
  In heavy silence, holding the lantern on knee
  As if it were a fretful baby.
  
  The fulvous glimmer
  Through one of his hands showed the flesh red, and seemed
  To etch the bones in it, the gnarled shafts of the fingers
  And scaly lumps in the skin.
  
  Clare heard the chained dog howling,
  And the rain had ceased.
  
  She reached in pitying tenderness
  And touched the old man's illuminated hand and said
  "How hard you have worked.
  
  " "Akh," he groaned, "so has he.
  
  And gets .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " He moved his hand to let the warm light
  Lie on her face, so that her face and his own were planets
  To the lantern sun; hers smooth except the wind-blistered lips,
  pure-featured, pitying, with large dark eyes
  The little sparkles of the reflected lantern had room to swim in;
  his bristly and wrinkled, and the eyes
  Like sparks in a bush; the sheep uneasily below the faces moved
  formless, only Saul's watchful head
  With the curled horns in the halo of light.
  
  The faint and farther
  rays of that sun touched falling spheres
  Of water from the eaves at the open side of the shed, or lost
  themselves at the other in cobwebbed corners
  And the dust of space.
  
  In the darkness beyond all stars the little
  river made a noise.
  
  The old man muttered,
  "I heard him choking night before last and still he goes on.
  
  It's a hell of a long ways to nothing .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You know the best thing to do?
  
  Tip this in the straw,"
  He tilted the lantern a little, "end in a minute,
  In a blaze and yell.
  
  " She said, "No! no!" and he felt
  The hay trembling beside him.
  
  The unconscious motion of her fear
  Was not inward but toward the sheep.
  
  He observed
  Nothing of that, but giggled to himself to feel
  The hay trembling beside him.
  
  He dipped his hand
  And caught her bare foot; clutching it with his fingers
  He scratched the sole with his thumb, but Clare sat quiet
  In pale terror of tipping the lantern.
  
  The old man
  Groaned and stood up.
  
  "You wouldn't sit like a stone
  If I were twenty years younger.
  
  Oh, damn you," he said,
  "You think we get old?
  
  I'm the same fresh flame of youth still,
  Stuck in an old wrinkled filthy rawhide
  That soon'll rot and lie choking.
  
  " She stammered, "Ah, no, no,
  You oughtn't to think so.
  
  You're well and strong.
  
  Or maybe
  At last it'll come suddenly or while you sleep,
  Never a pain.
  
  " He swung up the lantern
  Before his hairy and age-deformed face.
  
  "Look at me.
  
  Pfah!
  And still it's April inside.
  
  " He turned to go out,
  Clare whispered, "Oh! Wait.
  
  " She stood wringing her hands,
  Warm light and darkness in waves flushing and veiling
  Her perplexed face, the lantern in the old man's fist
  Swinging beyond his body.
  
  "Oh, how can I tell?
  
  "
  She said trembling.
  
  "You see: I'll never come back:
  If anything I could do would give you some pleasure;
  And you wouldn't be sorry after I'm gone.
  
  " He turned,
  Stamping his feet.
  
  "Heh?
  
  " He held up the lantern
  And stared at her face and giggled.
  
  She heard the sheep
  Nestling behind her and saw the old man's mouth
  Open to speak, a black hole under the grizzled thatch,
  And close again on round silence.
  
  "I'd like to make you
  Happier," she faltered.
  
  "Heh?
  
  " He seemed to be trembling
  Even more than Clare had trembled; he said at length,
  "Was you in earnest?
  
  " "I had a great trouble,
  So that now nothing seems hard .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  That a shell broke and truly I love all people.
  
  I'll .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  it's a little thing .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  my time is short.
  
  "
  He stood giggling and fidgeting.
  
  "Heh, heh?
  
  You be good.
  
  I've got to get my sleep.
  
  I was just making the rounds.
  
  He makes me nervous, that old man.
  
  It's his stomach
  Won't hold nothing.
  
  You wouldn't play tricks to-night
  And the old man puking his last?
  
  Now, you lie down.
  
  Sleep cosy," he said.
  
  The lantern went slowly winking away,
  And she was left among the warm sheep, and thoughts
  Of death, and to hear the stream; and again the wind
  Raved in the dark.
  
  She dreamed that a two-legged whiff of flame
  Rose up from the house gable-peak crying, "Oh! Oh!"
  And doubled in the middle and fled away on the wind
  Like music above the bee-hives.
  
  At dawn a fresh burst of rain
  Delayed her, and two of the sheep were coughing.
  
  She thought
  that no unfriendly person would come in the rain,
  And hoped the old man might think to bring her some food, she
  was very hungry.
  
  The house-dog that all night long
  Had yapped his chain's length, suddenly ran into the shed, then
  Clare leaped up in fear for the sheep, but this
  Was a friendly dog, loving to fondle and be fondled, he shook his
  sides like a mill-wheel and remained amongst them.
  
  The rain paused and returned, the sheep fed so contentedly
  Clare let them rest all morning in the happy shelter, she dulled her
  own hunger with sleep.
  
  About noon
  She lifted her long staff from the hay and stood up.
  
  "Come Saul,
  come little Hornie,
  Fay, Fern and Frannie and Leader, we have to go on.
  
  Tiny, Tiny, get up.
  
  Butt and Ben, come on":
  These were the two old wethers: and she bade the dog
  "Good-by, good-by.
  
  " He followed however; but at length
  Turned back from the crooked road up the open hill
  When cold rain fell.
  
  Clare was glad of that, yet she wished
  She'd had something to give him.
  
  VII
  She gained the blasty hill-top,
  The unhappy sheep huddling against her thighs,
  And so went northward barefoot in the gray rain,
  Abstractedly, like a sleepwalker on the ridge
  Of his inner necessity, or like
  Some random immortal wish of the solitary hills.
  
  If you had seen her you'd have thought that she always
  Walked north in the rain on the ridge with the sheep about her.
  
  Yet sometimes in the need of a little pleasure
  To star the gray, she'd stop in the road and kiss
  One of the wet foreheads: but then run quickly
  A few steps on, as if loitering were dangerous,
  You'd have pitied her to see her.
  
  Over Mescal Creek
  High on the hill, a brook in a rocky gulch, with no canyon,
  Light-headed hunger and cold and the loneliness unlocked
  Her troubled mind, she talked and sang as she went.
  
  "I can't eat
  the cold cress, but if there were acorns,
  Bitter acorns.
  
  Ai chinita que si,
  Ai que tu dami tu amor.
  
  Why did you
  Have to go dry at the pinch, Frannie?
  
  Poor thing, no matter.
  
  Que venga con migo chinita
  A donde vivo yo.
  
  I gave them all my bread, the poor shipwrecked people, and they
  wanted more.
  
  " She trembled and said, "They're cruel,
  But they were hungry.
  
  They'll never catch us I think.
  
  Oh, hurry, hurry.
  
  " With songs learned from the shepherd she
  came to the fall of the road into Mill Creek Canyon.
  
  Two of the sheep were sick and coughing, and Clare looked
  down.
  
  Flying bodies of fog, an unending fleet
  Of formless gray ships in a file fled down the great canyon
  Tearing their keels over the redwoods; Clare watched them and
  sang, "Oh, golondrina, oh, darting swallow,"
  And heard the ocean like the blood in her ears.
  
  The west-covered
  sun stared a wan light up-canyon
  Against the cataract of little clouds.
  
  The two coughing sheep
  Brought her to a stand; then she opened their mouths and found
  Their throats full of barbed seeds from the bad hay
  Greedily eaten; and the gums about their teeth
  Were quilled with the wicked spikes; which drawn, thin blood
  Dripped from the jaw.
  
  The folds of the throat her fingers
  Could not reach nor relieve; thereafter, when they coughed,
  Clare shook with pain.
  
  Her pity poisoned her strength.
  
  Unhappy shepherdess,
  Numbed feet and hands and the face
  Turbid with fever:
  You love, and that is no unhappy fate.
  
  Not one person but all, does it warm your winter?
  
  Walking with numbed and cut feet
  Along the last ridge of migration
  On the last coast above the not-to-be-colonized
  Ocean, across the streams of the people
  Drawing a faint pilgrimage
  As if you were drawing a line at the end of the world
  Under the columns of ancestral figures:
  So many generations in Asia,
  So many in Europe, so many in America:
  To sum the whole.
  
  Poor Clare Walker, she already
  Imagines what sum she will cast in April.
  
  She came by the farmhouse
  At Mill Creek, then she wavered in the road and went to the door>
  Leaving her sheep in the road; the day was draining
  Toward twilight.
  
  Clare began to go around the house,
  Then stopped and returned and knocked faintly at the door.
  
  No answer; but when she was turning back to the road
  The door was opened, by a pale slight young man
  With no more chin than a bird, and Mongol-slanted
  Eyes; he peered out, saying, "What do you want?
  
  " Clare stood
  Wringing the rain from her fingers.
  
  "Oh, oh," she stammered,
  "I don't know what.
  
  I have some sheep with me.
  
  I don't know where we can stay.
  
  " He stood in the door
  And looked afraid.
  
  The sheep came stringing down
  Through the gate Clare had left open.
  
  A gray-eyed man
  With a white beard pushed by the boy and said
  "What does she want?
  
  What, are you hungry?
  
  Take out your
  beasts,
  We can't have sheep in the yard.
  
  " Clare ran to the gate,
  "Come Leader, come Saul.
  
  " The old man returned indoors,
  Saying, "Wait outside, I'll get you some bread.
  
  " Clare waited,
  Leaning against the gate, it seemed a long while;
  The old man came back with changed eyes and changed voice:
  "We can't do anything for you.
  
  There isn't any bread.
  
  Move on from here.
  
  " She said through her chattering teeth,
  "Come Saul, come Leader, come Frannie.
  
  We have to go on.
  
  Poor Fern, come on.
  
  " They drifted across the Mill Creek bridge
  And up the road in the twilight.
  
  "The ground-squirrels," she said,
  "hide in their holes
  All winter long, and the birds have perches but we have no place.
  
  "
  They tried to huddle in the heart of a bush
  Under a redwood, Clare crouched with the sheep about her, her
  thighs against her belly, her face on her knees,
  Not sleeping, but in a twilight consciousness, while the night
  darkened.
  
  In an hour she thought she must move or die.
  
  "Ah little Hornie," she said, feeling with shrivelled fingers the
  sprouts of the horns in the small arched forehead,
  "Come Fern: are you there, Leader?
  
  Come Saul, come Nosie .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah, no, I was dreaming.
  
  Oh, dear," she whispered, "we're very
  Miserable now.
  
  " She crept out of the bush and the sheep followed;
  she couldn't count them, she heard them
  Plunge in the bush and heard them coughing behind her.
  
  They
  came on the road
  In the gray dark; there, though she'd meant to go north
  She went back toward the farmhouse.
  
  Crossing the bridge
  She smelled oak-smoke and thought of warmth.
  
  Grown reckless
  Clare entered the farmhouse yard with her fleeced following,
  But not daring enough to summon the door
  Peered in a window.
  
  What she saw within
  Mixed with her fever seemed fantastic and dreadful.
  
  It was
  nothing strange:
  The weak-faced youth, the bearded old man, and two old women
  Idle around a lamp on a table.
  
  They sat on their chairs in the
  warmth and streaming light and nothing
  Moved their faces.
  
  But Clare felt dizzy at heart, she thought they
  were waiting for death: how could they sit
  And not run and not cry?
  
  Perhaps they were dead already?
  
  Then,
  the old man's head
  Turned, and the youth's fingers drummed on his chair.
  
  One of the blank old women was sewing and the other
  Frowned and breathed.
  
  She lifted and spoke to white-beard, then
  the first old woman
  Flashed eyes like rusty knives and sheathed them again
  And sewed the cloth; they grew terribly quiet;
  Only the white beard quivered.
  
  The young man stood up
  And moved his mouth for a good while but no one
  Of those in the room regarded him.
  
  He sighed and saw
  Clare's face at the window.
  
  She leaped backward; the lamplight
  Had fed her eyes with blindness toward the gray night,
  She ran in a panic about the barren garden,
  Unable to find the gate; the sheep catching her fear
  Huddled and plunged, pricking the empty wet earth with numberless
  hoof-prints.
  
  But no one came out pursuing them,
  The doors were not opened, the house was quiet.
  
  Clare found
  the gate
  And stood by it, whispering, "Dear Tiny.
  
  Ah, Fern, that's you.
  
  Come Saul," she fumbled each head as it passed the gate-post,
  To count the flock.
  
  But all had not passed, a man on a horse
  Came plodding the puddled road.
  
  Clare thought the world
  Was all friendly except in that house, and she ran
  To the road's crown.
  
  "Oh, Oh," she called; and Onorio
  Vasquez answered, "I rode early in the morning
  To find you and couldn't find you.
  
  I've been north and south.
  
  I thought I could find the track of the sheep.
  
  " She answered
  Through chattering teeth, "I thought I could stand the rain.
  
  I'm sick and the sheep are sick.
  
  " He said gravely
  "There's hardly a man on the coast wouldn't have helped you
  Except in that house.
  
  There, I think they need help.
  
  Well, come and we'll live the night.
  
  " "How far?
  
  " she sighed
  Faintly, and he said "Our place is away up-canyon,
  You'll find it stiff traveling by daylight even.
  
  To-night's a camp.
  
  "
  He led her to the bridge, and there
  Found dry sticks up the bank, leavings of an old flood, under
  the spring of the timbers,
  And made a fire against the creekside under the road for a roof.
  
  He stripped her of the dripping cloak
  And clothed her in his, the oil-skin had kept it dry, and spread her
  the blanket from under his saddle to lie on.
  
  The bridge with the tarred road-bed on it was a roof
  Over their heads; the sheep, when Clare commanded them, lay
  down like dogs by the fire.
  
  The horse was tethered
  To a clump of willow in the night outside.
  
  When her feet and her
  hands began to be warm he offered her food,
  She ate three ravenous mouthfuls and ran from the fire and
  vomited.
  
  He heard her gasping in the night thicket
  And a new rain.
  
  He went after while and dragged her
  Back to the frugal fire and shelter of the bridge.
  
  VIII
  She lay and looked up at the great black timbers, the flapping fireshadows,
  And draggled cobwebs heavy with dirt and water;
  While Vasquez watched the artery in the lit edge
  Of her lean throat jiggle with its jet of blood
  Like a slack harp-string plucked: a toneless trembling:
  It made him grieve.
  
  After a time she exclaimed
  "My sheep.
  
  My sheep.
  
  Count them.
  
  " "What," he said, "they all
  Are here beside you.
  
  " "I never dreamed," she answered,
  "That any were lost, Oh no! But my sight swam
  When I looked at them in the bad light.
  
  " He looked
  And said "Are there not .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ten?
  
  " "No, nine," she answered.
  
  "Nosie has died.
  
  Count them and tell me the truth.
  
  "
  He stood, bowing down his head under the timbers,
  And counted seven, then hastily the first two
  A second time, and said "Nine.
  
  " "I'm glad of that,"
  She sighed, and was quiet, but her quill fingers working
  The border of the saddle blanket.
  
  He hoped she would soon
  Sleep.
  
  The horse tethered outside the firelight
  Snorted, and the sheep lifted their heads, a spot of white
  Came down the dark slope.
  
  Vasquez laid his brown palm
  Over Clare's wrists, "Lie still and rest.
  
  The old fellow from the
  house is coming.
  
  Sleep if you can, I'll talk to him.
  
  " "Is there a dog?
  
  " she whispered
  trembling.
  
  "No, no, the old man is alone.
  
  "
  Who peered under the heavy stringer of the bridge, his beard
  shone in the firelight.
  
  "Here," he shouted, "Hey!
  Burn the road, would you?
  
  You want to make people stay home
  And suck the sour bones in their own houses?
  
  Come out of that
  hole.
  
  " But Vasquez: "Now, easy, old neighbor.
  
  She wanted
  Fire and a roof, she's found what you wouldn't give.
  
  " "By God,
  and a man to sleep with," he said, "that's lucky,
  But the bridge, the bridge.
  
  " "Don't trouble, I'm watching the
  fire.
  
  Fire's tame, this weather.
  
  " The old man stood twitching
  and peering,
  And heard the sheep coughing in their cave
  Under the road.
  
  He squinted toward Clare, and muttered at
  length meekly, "Let me stay a few minutes.
  
  To sit by the little road-fire of freedom.
  
  My wife and my sister
  have hated each other for thirty years,
  And I between them.
  
  It makes the air of the house.
  
  I sometimes
  think I can see it boil up like smoke
  When I look back at the house from the hill above.
  
  " Vasquez said
  gravely
  "I have often watched that.
  
  " He answered "You haven't lived in
  it.
  
  They sit in the house and feed on their own poison
  And live forever.
  
  I am now too feeble with age to escape.
  
  " Clare
  Walker lifted her head, and faintly:
  "Oh stay," she said, "I wish I could gather all that are unhappy
  Before I die.
  
  But why do they hate each other?
  
  "
  "Their nature," he answered, "old women.
  
  " She sighed and lay
  down.
  
  "I shan't grow old.
  
  " "Young fellow," the old man said wearily
  To Vasquez, "they all make that promise, they never keep it.
  
  Life glides by and the bright loving creatures
  Eat us in the evening.
  
  I'd have given this
  girl bread
  And meat, but my hawks were watching me.
  
  " He'd found a stone
  On the edge of the creek, the other side of the fire, and squatted
  there, his two fists
  Closing his eyes, the beard shimmering between the bent wrists.
  
  His voice being silent they heard the fire
  Burst the tough bark of a wet branch; the wind turned north,
  then a gust of hail spattered in the willows
  And checked at once, the air became suddenly cold.
  
  The old man
  lifted his face: "Ah can't you talk?
  
  I thought you'd be gay or I'd not have stayed here, you too've
  grown old?
  
  I wish that a Power went through the world
  And killed people at thirty when the ashes crust them.
  
  You,
  cowboy, die, your joints will begin to crackle,
  You've had the best.
  
  Young bank-clerk, you've had the best,
  grow fat and sorry and more dollars?
  
  Here farmer, die,
  You've spent the money: will you bleed the mortgage
  Fifty years more?
  
  You, cunning pussy of the world, youVe had
  the fun and the kissing, skip the diseases.
  
  Oh you, you're an honest wife and you've made a baby: why
  should you watch him
  Grow up and spoil, and dull like cut lead?
  
  I see, my dear, you'll
  never be filled till you grow poisonous,
  With eyes like rusty knives under the gray eyebrows.
  
  God bless
  you, die.
  
  " He had risen from the stone, and trampled,
  Each condemnation, some rosy coal fallen out at the fire's edge
  Under his foot as if it had been a life.
  
  "Sharp at thirty," he said.
  
  Clare vaguely moaned
  And turned her face to the outer darkness, then Vasquez,
  Misunderstanding her pain, thinking it stemmed
  From the old man's folly: "Don't mind him, he's not in earnest.
  
  These nothing-wishers of life are never in earnest;
  Make mouths to scare you: if they meant it they'd do it
  And not be alive to make mouths.
  
  " She made no answer,
  But lay and listened to her own rustling pulse-beat,
  Her knees drawn up to her breast.
  
  White-beard knelt down and
  mended the fire,
  And brushed his knees.
  
  "There's another law that I'd make: to
  burn the houses.
  
  Turn out the people on the roads,
  And neither homes nor old women we'd be well off.
  
  All young,
  all gay, all moving, free larks and foolery
  By gipsy fires.
  
  " His voice fell sad: "It's bitter to be a reformer:
  with two commandments
  I'd polish the world a-shining, make the sun ashamed.
  
  "
  Clare Walker stood up, then suddenly sought the dark night
  To hide herself in the bushes; her bowels were loosened
  With cold and fever.
  
  Vasquez half rose to follow her,
  And he understood, and stayed by the fire.
  
  Then white-beard
  Winking and nodding whispered: "Is she a good piece?
  
  Hey, is she sick?
  
  I have to protect my son.
  
  Where in hell did she get the sheep?
  
  " Vasquez said fiercely,
  "You'd better get home, your wife'll be watching for you.
  
  This girl is sick and half starved, I was unwilling
  To let her die in the road.
  
  " The old man stood up
  As pricked with a pin at the thought of home.
  
  "What?
  
  We're
  free men,"
  He said, lifting his feet in an anxious dance
  About the low fire: "but it's devilish hard
  To be the earthly jewel of two jealous women.
  
  "
  "Look," Vasquez said, "it seems to me that your house is afire.
  
  I see rolls of tall smoke .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "By God," he answered,
  "I wish it were," he trotted up to the road
  While a new drift of hail hissed in the willows,
  Softening to rain.
  
  When he was gone, Vasquez
  Repaired the fire, and called "Clare! Come in to shelter.
  
  Clare, come! The rain is ilm^n'oiio for you.
  
  The old fool's gone
  home.
  
  "
  He stumbled in the dark along the strand of the creek,
  Calling "Clare, Clare!" then looking backward he saw
  The huddle of firelit fleeces moving and rising,
  And said "The sheep are scattering away to find you.
  
  You ought to call them.
  
  " She came then, and stood by the fire.
  
  He heard the bleating cease, and looked back to see her
  Quieting her friends, wringing the rain from her hair,
  The fire had leaped up to a blaze.
  
  Vasquez returned
  Under the bridge, then Clare with her lips flushed
  And eyes brilliant with fever: "That poor old man, has he gone?
  
  I'm sorry if he's gone.
  
  My father was old, but after he'd plowed the hilltop I've seen
  him ride
  The furrows at a dead run, sowing the grain with both hands,
  while he controlled the colt with his knees.
  
  The time it fell at the furrow's end
  In the fat clay, he was up first and laughing.
  
  He was kind and
  cruel.
  
  " "Your father?
  
  " he said.
  
  She answered
  "I can't remember my mother, she died to bear me, as I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  We
  kept her picture, she looked like me,
  And often my father said I was like her.
  
  Oh what's become of the
  poor old man, has he gone home?
  
  Here he was happy.
  
  " "Yes, had to go home," he answered.
  
  "But
  you must sleep.
  
  I'll leave you alone if you like,
  You promise to stay by the fire and sleep.
  
  " "Oh I couldn't, truly.
  
  My mind's throwing all its wrecks on the shore
  And I can't sleep.
  
  That was a shipwreck that drove us wandering.
  
  I remember all things.
  
  Your name's Onorio Vasquez:
  I wish you had been my brother.
  
  " He smiled and touched her
  cold hand.
  
  "For then," she said, "we could talk
  Old troubles asleep: I haven't thought, thought,
  For a long while, to-night I can't stop my thoughts.
  
  But we all
  must die?
  
  " "Spread out your hands to the fire,
  Warm yourself, Clare.
  
  " "No, no," she answered, her teeth chattering,
  "I'm hot.
  
  My throat aches, yet you see I don't cough, it was Frannie coughing.
  
  It was almost as if I killed my father,
  To swear to the lies I told after he was killed, all to save Charlie.
  
  Do you think he'd care, after .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  He was surely dead?
  
  You don't believe we have spirits?
  
  Nobody
  believes we have spirits.
  
  " He began to answer,
  And changed his words for caution.
  
  "Clare: all you are saying
  Is hidden from me.
  
  It's like the visions I have,
  That go from unknown to unknown.
  
  " He said proudly,
  "I've watched, the whole night of a full moon, an army of
  centaurs
  Come out of the ocean, plunging on Sovranes reef
  In wide splendors of silver water,
  And swim with their broad hooves between the reef and the
  shore and go up
  Over the mountain I never knew why.
  
  What you are saying is like that.
  
  " "Oh, I'll tell you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "Tomorrow,"
  He pleaded, remembering she'd eaten nothing and seeing
  The pulse like a plucked harp-string jiggle in her throat;
  He felt like a pain of his own the frail reserves of her body
  Burn unreplenished.
  
  "Oh, but I'll tell you: so then
  You'll know me, as if we'd been born in the same house,
  You'll tell me not to be afraid: maybe I'll sleep
  At the turn of night.
  
  Onorio that's really your name?
  
  How stately a name you have lie down beside me.
  
  I am now so changed: every one's lovely in my eyes
  Whether he's brown or white or that poor old man:
  In those days nobody but Charlie Maurice
  Seemed very dear, as if I'd been blind to all the others.
  
  He lived on the next hill, two miles across a deep valley, and then
  it was five to the next neighbor
  At Vicente Springs; people are so few there.
  
  We lived a long way
  south, where the hills fall straight to the sea,
  And higher than these.
  
  He lived with his people.
  
  We used to meet
  near a madrone-tree, Charlie would kiss me
  And put his hands on my breasts under my clothes.
  
  It was quite
  long before we learned the sweet way
  That brings much joy to most living creatures, but brought us
  misery at last.
  
  IX
  "My father," she said,
  "Had lived there for thirty years, but after he sold his cattle
  And pastured sheep, to make more money, the neighbors
  Were never our friends.
  
  Oh, they all feared my father;
  Sometimes they threatened our shepherd, a Spanish man
  Who looked like you, but was always laughing.
  
  He'd laugh
  And say 'Guarda a Walker!' so then they'd leave him.
  
  But we lived lonely.
  
  "One morning of great white clouds gliding
  from the sea,
  When I was with Charlie in the hollow near the madrones, I felt
  a pleasure like a sweet fire: for all
  My joy before had been in his pleasure: but this was my own, it
  frightened me.
  
  " She stopped speaking, for Vasquez
  Stood up and left her: he went and sat by the fire.
  
  Then Clare:
  "Why do you leave me, Onorio?
  
  Are you angry now?
  
  "
  "I am afraid," he answered, "of this love.
  
  My visions are the life of my life: if I let the pitcher
  Break on the rock and the sun kill the stars,
  Life would be emptier than death.
  
  " Her mind went its own way,
  Not understanding so strange a fear: "The clouds were as bright
  as stars and I could feel them," she said,
  "Through the shut lids of my eyes while the sweet fire
  Poured through my body: I knew that some dreadful pain would
  pay for such joy.
  
  I never slept after that
  But dreamed of a laughing child and wakened with running tears.
  
  After I had trembled for days and nights
  I asked Tia Livia that was our shepherd's cousin, she helped me
  keep house what sign tells women
  When they have conceived: she told me the moon then ceases
  To rule our blood.
  
  I counted the days then,
  Not dreaming that Tia Livia would spy and talk.
  
  Was that not strange?
  
  I think that she told the shepherd too,
  And the shepherd had warned my lover: for Charlie failed
  Our meeting time, but my father was there with a gray face.
  
  In silence, he didn't accuse me, we went home together.
  
  "I met my lover in another place.
  
  'Oh Charlie,
  Why do you wear a revolver?
  
  " He said the mountain
  Was full of rattlers, 'We've killed twenty in a week.
  
  There never have been so many, step carefully sweetheart.
  
  '
  Sweetheart he called me: you're listening Onorio?
  
  'Step carefully by the loose stones.
  
  ' We were too frightened that day
  To play together the lovely way we had learned.
  
  "The next time that I saw him, he and my father
  Met on a bare hilltop against a gray cloud.
  
  I saw him turn back, but then I saw that he was ashamed
  To seem afraid of a man on the ridge of earth,
  With the hills and the ocean under his feet: and my father called
  him.
  
  -What was that moan?
  
  " She stopped, and Vasquez
  Heard it far off, and heard the sap of a stick whistle in the fire.
  
  "Nothing," he said, "low thunder
  Far out the ocean, or the surf in the creek-mouth.
  
  " "I was running
  up the steep slope to reach them, the breath in my heart
  Like saw-grass cut me, I had no power to cry out, the stones and
  the broken stubble flaked under my feet
  So that I seemed running in one place, unable to go up.
  
  It was not
  because he hated my father,
  But he was so frightened.
  
  They stood as if they were talking, a
  noise of smoke
  Blew from between them, my father turned then and walked
  Slowly along the cloud and sat on the hilltop
  As if he were tired.
  
  I said after a time, without thinking,
  'Go home, Charlie.
  
  I'll say that he killed himself.
  
  And give me the revolver, I'll say it was his.
  
  '
  So Charlie did.
  
  But when the men came up from Salinas I told my lie
  So badly that they believed I was the murderer.
  
  I smelled the jail a long while.
  
  I saw the day moon
  Down the long street the morning I was taken to court,
  As weary-looking and stained as if it were something of mine.
  
  I remembered then, that since I came there my blood
  Had never been moved when the moon filled: what Livia'd told
  me.
  
  So then I told them my father took his own life
  Because the sheep had a sickness and I was pregnant.
  
  The shepherd and Livia swore that they saw him do it.
  
  I'd have been let home:
  But the fever I'd caught gathered to a bursting pain,
  I had to be carried from the courthouse to the hospital
  And for a time knew nothing.
  
  When I began to see with my eyes again
  The doctor said: 'The influenza that takes
  Many lives has saved yours, you'll not have a child.
  
  Listen,’ he said, 'my girl, if you're wise.
  
  Your miscarriage is your luck.
  
  Your pelvis the bones down there
  Are so deformed that it's not possible for you
  To bear a living baby: no life can pass there:
  And yours would be lost.
  
  You'd better remember,
  And try not to be reckless.
  
  ' I remember so well, Onorio.
  
  I have good reason to remember.
  
  You never could guess
  What a good reason.
  
  My little king was dead
  And I was too weak to care.
  
  I have a new king.
  
  "When I got home," she said patiently,
  "Everybody believed that I was a murderer;
  And Charlie was gone.
  
  They left me so much alone
  That often I myself believed it.
  
  I'd lead the sheep to that hill,
  There were fifty left out of three hundred,
  And pray for pardon.
  
  "
  Sleep and her fever confused her brain,
  One heard phrases in the running babble, across a new burst of
  hail.
  
  "Forgive me, father, for I didn't
  Know what I was doing.
  
  " And, "Why have you forsaken me,
  father?
  
  " Her mind was living again the bare south hilltop
  And the bitter penitence among the sheep.
  
  "The two men that
  I loved and the baby that I never saw,
  AH taken away.
  
  "
  Then Vasquez was calling her name to break
  the black memories; she turned on her side, the flame-light
  Leaped, and he saw her face puckering with puzzled wonder.
  
  "Not
  all alone?
  
  But how can that be?
  
  "
  She sighed and said, "Oh Leader, don't stray for a while.
  
  Dear
  Saul: can you keep them here on the hill around me
  Without my watching?
  
  No one else helps me.
  
  I'll lie down here
  on the little grass in the windy sun
  And think whether I can live.
  
  I have you, dear stragglers.
  
  Thoughts come and go back as lightly as deer on the hill,
  But as hard to catch .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Not all alone.
  
  Oh.
  
  Not alone at all.
  
  Indeed it is even stranger than I thought.
  
  "
  She laughed and sat up.
  
  "Oh sweet warm sun .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Are you there, Onorio?
  
  But where's the poor old man
  Who seemed to be so unhappy?
  
  I wish he hadn't gone home,
  For now I remember what I ought to tell him.
  
  I'm sadly changed
  Since that trouble and sickness, and though I'm happy
  I hardly ever remember in the nick o' time
  What ought to be said.
  
  You must tell him
  That all our pain comes from restraint of love.
  
  "
  The hail had suddenly hushed, and all her words
  Were clear but hurried.
  
  "I learned it easily, Onorio,
  And never have thought about it again till now.
  
  The only
  wonder's
  Not to've known always.
  
  The beetle beside my hand in the grass
  and the little brown bird tilted on a stone,
  The short sad grass, burnt on the gable of the world with near
  sun and all winds: there was nothing there that I didn't
  Love with my heart, yes the hill though drunk with dear blood:
  I looked far over the valley at the patch of oaks
  At the head of a field, where Charlie's people had lived (they had
  moved away) and loved them, although they'd been
  Always unfriendly I never thought of it.
  
  " Then Vasquez, for the
  first time forgetting the person a moment
  To regard the idea: "You were cut off from the natural objects
  of love, you turned toward others.
  
  " "Ah," she answered
  Eagerly, "I'd always been turned to all others,
  And tired my poor strength confining the joy to few.
  
  But now
  I'd no more reason to confine it, I'd nothing
  Left to lose nor keep back.
  
  Has the poor old man gone?
  
  He seemed to be truly unhappy.
  
  Wasn't he afraid we'd burn the bridge; we ought surely
  To have drowned our fire.
  
  I was sick, or I'd have done .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  anything.
  
  But old men are so strange, to want and not want,
  And then be angry.
  
  "
  "He has gone," he answered.
  
  "Now, Clare, if you could eat something, then sleep,
  To fill the cup for to-morrow.
  
  "
  "I have to tell you the rest.
  
  Why did he go?
  
  Was he angry at me?
  
  Oh, I feel better, Onorio,
  But never more open-eyed.
  
  "There was one of those great owly hawks
  That soar for hours, turning and turning below me along the
  bottom of the slope: I so loved it
  I thought if it were hungry I'd give it my hand for meat.
  
  "Then winter came.
  
  Then about Christmas time (because I'd counted the months and
  remembered Christmas) storm followed storm
  Like frightened horses tethered to a tree, around and around.
  
  Three men came in the door without knocking,
  Wherever they moved, water and black oil ran down.
  
  There'd
  been a shipwreck.
  
  I gave them the house, then one of them
  Found the axe and began chopping firewood, another went back
  across wild rain to the fall of the hill
  And shouted.
  
  He was so big, like a barrel walking, I ran in his
  shelter
  And saw the great, black, masted thing almost on shore, lying on
  its side in the shadow of the hill,
  And the flying steam of a fire they'd built on the beach.
  
  All that
  morning the people came up like ants,
  Poor souls they were all so tired and cold, some hurt and some
  crying.
  
  I'd only," she said, "a few handfuls of flour
  Left in the house.
  
  " She trembled and lay down.
  
  "I can't remember
  any more.
  
  "
  Vasquez made up the fire,
  And went and drew up the blanket over Clare's shoulder.
  
  He found her shuddering.
  
  "Now sleep.
  
  Now rest.
  
  " She answered:
  "They killed a sheep.
  
  They were hungry.
  
  I'd grown to love so much the flock that was left.
  
  Our shepherd, I think, had taken them away mostly
  While I was kept in Salinas.
  
  I heard her crying when they threw her down, she thought I
  could save her.
  
  Her soft white throat.
  
  'That night I crept out in the thin rain at moonrise
  And led them so far away, all that were left,
  The house and the barn might hold a hundred hungry mouths
  To hunt us all night and day and could never find us.
  
  We hid in oak-woods.
  
  There was nothing to eat,
  And never any dry place.
  
  We walked in the gray rain in the flowing
  gorges of canyons that no one
  But the hawks have seen, and climbed wet stone and saw the
  storms racing below us, but still the thin rain
  Sifted through the air as if it fell from the stars.
  
  I was then much
  stronger
  Than ever since then.
  
  "A man caught me at last, when I was too
  weak to run, and conquered my fear.
  
  He was kind, he promised me not to hurt the poor flock,
  But the half of them had been lost, I never could remember how.
  
  He lived alone; I was sick in his cabin
  For many days, dreaming that a monkey nursed me: he looked
  so funny, he'd a frill of red hair
  All around his face.
  
  "When I grew better, he wanted to do like
  Charlie.
  
  I knew what the doctor had said,
  But I was ashamed to speak of death: I was often ashamed in
  those days: he'd been so kind.
  
  Yet terror
  Would come and cover my head like a cold wave.
  
  I watched the moon, but at the full moon my fear
  Flowed quietly away in the night.
  
  "The spring and summer were full of pleasure and happiness.
  
  I’d no more fear of my friend, but we met seldom.
  
  I went in
  freedom
  From mountain to mountain, wherever good pasture grew,
  Watching the creeks grow quiet and color themselves
  With cool green moss, and the green hills turn white.
  
  The people at the few farms all knew me, and now
  Their minds changed; they were kind.
  
  All the deer knew me;
  They'd walk in my flock.
  
  "In the midst of summer,
  When the moon filled my blood failed to be moved,
  The life that will make death began in my body.
  
  I'd seen that moon when it was little as a chip
  Over my left shoulder, from Palos ridge
  By a purple cloud.
  
  X
  "Oh, not till April," she said.
  
  "All's quiet now, the bitterness is past, I have made peace
  With death except in my dreams, those can't be ruled.
  
  But then,
  when I first
  Began to believe and knew it had happened .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I felt badly.
  
  I went back to my father's house,
  Much was broken and chopped down, but I found
  Little things that I'd loved when I was a child, hidden in corners.
  
  When I was drunk with crying
  We hurried away.
  
  The lambs never seemed able to live, the
  mothers were glad to give me their milk,
  We hid in the secret hills till it seemed desolate to die there.
  
  Tell me, Onorio,
  What month is this?
  
  "
  He answered, "Clare, Clare, fear nothing.
  
  Death is as far away from you as from any one.
  
  There was a girl (I've heard my brothers talking:
  The road-overseer's daughter) was four or five months along
  And went to a doctor: she had no trouble:
  She's like a virgin again.
  
  " dare struck the earth with her hands
  And raised her body, she stared through the red of the fire
  With brilliant confused eyes.
  
  "Your face was like a devil's in the
  steamy glimmer:
  But only because you don't understand.
  
  Why, Tia Livia herself
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  you are too innocent, Onorio,
  Has done so .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  but women often have small round stones
  Instead of hearts.
  
  " "But," he answered, "if you're not able to
  bear it.
  
  Not even a priest would bid you die
  For a child that couldn't be born alive.
  
  You've lived too much
  alone, bodiless fears have become
  Giants in secret.
  
  I too am not able to think clearly tonight, in
  the stinging drift of the fire
  And the strange place, to-morrow I'll tell you plainly.
  
  My mind
  is confused
  As I have sometimes felt it before the clouds of the world
  Were opened: but I know: for disease to refuse cure
  Is self-murder, not virtue.
  
  " She squatted upright,
  Wrapping the coat about her shoulders and knees,
  And said, "Have you never seen in your visions
  The golden country that our souls came from,
  Before we looked at the moon and stars and knew
  They are not perfect?
  
  We came from a purer peace
  In a more perfect heaven; where there was nothing
  But calm delight, no cold, no sickness, no sharp hail,
  The haven of neither hunger nor sorrow,
  But all-enfolding love and unchangeable joy
  Near the heart of life.
  
  " Vasquez turned from the fire
  And stared at her lit face.
  
  "How did you learn
  This wonder?
  
  It is true.
  
  " "I remembered it,"
  She answered, "when I was in trouble.
  
  " "This is the bitter-sweet
  memory,"
  He said, "that makes the breast of the earth bitter
  After we are born and the dear sun ridiculous.
  
  We shall return
  there, we homesick.
  
  "
  "No," she answered.
  
  "The place was my mother's body before
  I was born.
  
  You may remember it a little but I've
  Remembered plainly: and the wailing pain of entering this air.
  
  I've thought and thought and remembered.
  
  I found
  A cave in a high cliff of white stone, when I was hiding from
  people: it was there I had the first memory.
  
  There I'd have stayed in the safe darkness forever; the sheep
  were hungry and strayed out, so I couldn't stay.
  
  I remembered again when I went home to our house and the
  door hung crazy
  On a snapped hinge.
  
  You don't believe me, Onorio,
  But after while you'll remember plainly, if some long trouble
  Makes you want peace; or being handled has broken your shame.
  
  I have no shame now.
  
  " He answered nothing
  Because she seemed to speak from a frantic mind.
  
  After a moment, "No matter," she said.
  
  "When I was in my worst
  trouble
  I knew that the child was feeding on peace and happiness.
  
  I had
  happiness here in my body.
  
  It is not mine,
  But I am its world and the sky around it, its loving God.
  
  It is
  having the prime and perfect of life,
  The nine months that are better than the ninety years.
  
  I'd not
  steal one of its days to save my life.
  
  I am like its God, how could I betray it?
  
  It has not moved yet
  But feels its blessedness in its quietness; but soon I shall feel it
  move, Tia Livia said it will nestle
  Down the warm nest and flutter like a winged creature.
  
  It shook
  her body, she said.
  
  " But Vasquez, loathing
  To hear these things, labored with the sick fire
  In the steam of the wet wood, not listening, then Clare
  Sighed and lay down.
  
  He heard her in a moment
  Miserably sobbing, he went and touched her.
  
  "What is it?
  
  Clare?
  
  Clare?
  
  " "Ai, when will morning come?
  
  It is horrible to lie still," she said, "feeling
  The black of April .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  it's nothing, it's nothing .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  like a cat
  Tick tick on padded feet.
  
  Ah let me alone, will you?
  
  Lying quiet does it: I'll have courage in my time.
  
  "
  A little later she asked for food, she ate,
  And drank from the stream, and slept.
  
  She moved in her sleep
  And tossed her arms, Vasquez would cover them again,
  But the fever seemed quieted.
  
  He crossed the stream by the
  stones in the dull fire-glimmer
  And fetched armfuls of flood-wood from under the opposite
  bridge-head.
  
  The fire revived; the earth turned past midnight;
  Far eastward beyond the coasts of the continent morning troubled
  the Atlantic.
  
  XI
  Vasquez crouched by the fire
  And felt one of those revelations that were in his own regard
  the jewels and value of his life
  Approach and begin.
  
  First passed as always
  Since Barclay was gone, whom he had taken for incarnate God
  ancestral forms against the white cloud,
  The high dark heads of Indian migrations, going south along the
  coast, drawn down from the hungry straits and from Asia,
  The heads like worn coins and the high shoulders,
  The brown-lipped patient mouths below vulture beaks, and burnished
  fall of black hair over slant foreheads,
  Going up to the Mayan and the Aztec mountains, and sowing
  the coast.
  
  They swept the way and the cloud cleared,
  The vision would come: came instead a strong pause.
  
  A part of his mind
  Wished to remember what the rest had forgotten,
  And groping for it in the dark withstood the prepared
  Pageant of dreams.
  
  He'd read in his curious boyhood
  Of the child the mother is found incapable of bearing
  Cut from the mother's belly.
  
  Both live: the wound
  Heals: it was called the Caesarean section.
  
  But he, fearing
  Whatever thought might threaten to infringe his careful
  Chastity of mind, had quickly canceled the memory;
  That now sought a new birth; it might save Clare
  If he could think of it.
  
  That revived part
  Made itself into the vision, all to no purpose,
  His precious dreams were never to the point of life.
  
  Only the imperial name, and the world's
  Two-thousand-year and ten-thousand-miles-traveled
  Caesarean memory appeared.
  
  He imagined at first that the voice
  Cried "Ave Maria," but it cried "Ave Caesar.
  
  "
  He saw the firelight-gilded
  Timbers of the bridge above; and one of the ewes lifted her head
  in the light beside Clare sleeping;
  The smoke gathered its cloud into a floating globe and these were
  forgotten.
  
  On the globe of the earth
  The aquiline-headed Roman, who summed in his one person the
  powers and ordered science of humanity,
  Stood and possessed his orb of empire, and looked at the stars.
  
  Then the voice cried
  "The pride of the earth.
  
  "
  But Vasquez laughed aloud, for the
  earth was a grain of dust circling the fire,
  And the fire itself but a spark, among innumerable sparks.
  
  The
  swarm of the points of light drifting
  No path down darkness merged its pin-prick eyelets into one
  misty glimmer, a millstone in shape,
  A coin in shape, a mere coin, a flipped luckpenny: but again
  Vasquez
  Laughed out, for who was the spendthrift sowed them all over
  the sky, indistinguishable innumerable
  Fish-scales of light?
  
  They drew together as they drifted away
  no path down the wild darkness; he saw
  The webs of their rays made them one tissue, their rays that
  were their very substance and power filled wholly
  The space they were in, so that each one touched all, there was
  no division between them, no emptiness, and each
  Changed substance with all the others and became the others.
  
  It was dreadful to see
  No space between them, no cave of peace nor no night of quietness,
  no blind spot nor no deaf heart, but the tides
  Of power and substance flood every cranny; no annihilation, no
  escape but change: it must endure itself
  Forever.
  
  It has the strength to endure itself.
  
  We others, being
  faintly made of the dust of a grain of dust
  Have been permitted to fool our patience asleep by inventing
  death.
  
  A poor comfort, he thought,
  Yet better than none, the imaginary cavern, how we all come
  clamoring
  To the gates of our great invention after few years.
  
  Though a cheat, it works.
  
  The speckled tissue of universes
  Drew into one formed and rounded light, and Vasquez
  Worshiped the one light.
  
  One eye .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what, an eye?
  
  A dark mountain with an eye in its cliff?
  
  A coal-black stallion
  Eyed with one burning eye in the mid brow?
  
  Night has an eye.
  
  The poor little vision-seer
  Groaned, that he never had wit to understand visions.
  
  See all and know nothing.
  
  The eye that makes its own light
  And sees nothing but itself.
  
  "I am seeing Barclay again,"
  He marveled, as who should say "I am seeing God:
  But what is God?
  
  " He continued gazing,
  And beads of sweat spilled from his forehead into the fire-edge
  Ashes.
  
  He saw at last, neither the eyed mountain
  Nor the stallion, nor Barclay, but his own eye
  In the darkness of his own face.
  
  The circuit was closed:
  "I can endure all things," he thought, "forever.
  
  I am he
  Whom I have sought.
  
  "And Clare loves all things
  Because all things are herself.
  
  She has killed her father
  And inherited.
  
  Her old enormous father
  Who rode the furrows full tilt, sowing with both hands
  The high field above the hills and the ocean.
  
  We kill steers for
  meat, and God
  To be atoned with him.
  
  But I remain from myself divided, gazing
  beyond the flaming walls,
  Not fortunate enough, and too faint-hearted.
  
  "
  He continued gazing
  across the wane of the fire at the dark
  Vision of his own face turned sideways, the light of one eye.
  
  Clare turned in her place and awoke and said,
  "How awfully little.
  
  Ooh, Ooh," in a dove's voice,
  And then, "I forgot I wasn't alone, Onorio:
  And here are the sheep.
  
  Have I slept a moment?
  
  I did have a strange dream.
  
  I went out across the starlight
  Knocking through flight after flight of the shiny balls
  And got so far away that the sun and the great earth
  And beautiful moon and all the stars were blended
  Into one tiny light, Oh terribly little,
  The flame of a pitiful little candle blown over
  In the wind of darkness, in the fear of the night.
  
  It was so tiny
  I wanted to be its comfort
  And hold it and rock it on my breast.
  
  One wee flicker
  In all the wild dark.
  
  What a dream.
  
  " She turned anxiously
  To touch the sheep, fondling their heads and naming them.
  
  "Dear Fay, dear Fern.
  
  And here's Captain Saul.
  
  Ah bad little
  Hornie
  Who taught you to be so bold?
  
  " Suddenly she cried
  "Did Leader and Frannie go out did two of the sheep
  Go out lately?
  
  " But Vasquez, caught in his vision,
  Answered "You also have broken
  The fire-studded egg of heaven and we're together
  In the world outside.
  
  " "Ah Ah," she cried desolately,
  "Did you lie when you counted them?
  
  When I was sick
  And my eyes failed?
  
  " She ran into the darkness outside, calling
  their names;
  The flock that remained stood up, in the edge of firelight, tremulously
  crying.
  
  Then Vasquez: "I hear a multitude
  Of people crying, but why do you lament and cry?
  
  You particles
  of the eye of light, if some of you
  Endure evil, the others endure good, the balance is perfect.
  
  The
  eye lives on mixed light and darkness,
  Not either alone.
  
  And you are not many but one, the eye is not
  glad nor sorry, nor the dark face
  Disquieted: be quiet, voices, and hear the real voice.
  
  " Clare
  Walker came in from the dark with wide strained eyes,
  In each iris the fire reflected made a red stain, and she cried:
  "Onorio, for Christ's sake tell me, were they not with me?
  
  Or have they slipped out?
  
  " He turned slowly an unanswering face
  Of cool, dark and deaf stone, tempered to the mood
  Of what he imagined .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  or perhaps perceived.
  
  And Clare:
  "If I have slept and been dreaming while they're in danger
  Or die in the dark: and they cried for me
  In the dead night, while I slept and ate: I hope that all the
  miseries I ever feared for myself
  Will come doubled, the rain on my hair be knives of ice, the sun
  whips of fire, the death I must die
  Drawn out and dreadful like the dream of hell: Onorio, Oh come,
  Help me to find them!" He rose, passively under command in
  the shrill of her voice, muttering: "I can't
  Imagine what further's to find: yet I'll go along.
  
  Is there another light or another darkness?
  
  "
  "Oh," she answered, "it's black," and snatched the most eager brands
  Out of the fire for a torch.
  
  He with deft fingers
  Mimicking her act, but with a sleepwalker mindlessness,
  Bound fire into a bundle of sallow twigs,
  And calmly, twirling his torch to flame, followed
  The red glow of her rod-ends.
  
  They ran on the bridge and wandered
  Up the wet road, Clare calling her flock around her
  And sobbing the names of the lost.
  
  The useless torches
  Flared in the puddles and ruts of water, and ruddied
  The plump backs of the sheep; so sanguine-outlined
  The little ridiculous procession strayed up the road
  In the lane of the trees, the great-trunked wood like storms
  Of darkness on either hand.
  
  The torches died soon,
  Then Clare stood still, desolately calling; weak dawn
  Had washed all the world gray.
  
  The heads of the little flock
  Suddenly and all together were turned one way, then a limping ewe
  Came out of the wood.
  
  Clare screamed with joy, and ran and
  dropped on her knees to embrace the lean neck.
  
  "Oh Leader!
  Leader! She's safe, Onorio.
  
  Oh Leader where's Frannie?
  
  " But
  then the wound was discovered, the flap torn back
  Red from the flank and hanging from the rump, and the blood-caked
  wool.
  
  Clare moaned awhile with no words, and said,
  "When I forgot you because I was sick, when I forgot to call
  you and count you in the rain in the night:
  I wish I had died.
  
  I have nothing but these,
  Onorio, to take care of, and lose and lose.
  
  She used to go first
  always, I called her Leader:
  And now she's hurt.
  
  " Onorio heard Clare's teeth clacking together
  in the thin cheeks, and her breath
  Hissing between them, he answered calmly, still caught in his
  vision: "The five claws of a lion.
  
  Look, Clare.
  
  But don't grieve, the great river of the blood of life is always
  bursting its banks, never runs dry,
  Secret inexhaustible fountains feed it.
  
  " She stared at his face and
  turned on the forest her desert eyes
  And wrung her hands.
  
  "Leader is hurt; and Frannie I think has died.
  
  "
  They searched long; the fourth hour
  Of daylight they found the half consumed body.
  
  The head was
  not mangled, Clare fell beside it
  On the wet earth and kissed the half open eyes,
  Weeping and self-reproachful, but yet she lamented
  Less violently than Vasquez had feared.
  
  At length
  He said, "If you wish, Clare, I will fetch tools
  And bury it here.
  
  " She answered faintly, "No matter.
  
  She feels nothing to-day, darkness nor light,
  Teeth nor the grave.
  
  Oh, I loved her well: but now, see,
  She's not living any more, Onorio .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  isn't that your name?
  
  What a stately name! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  this is the one that fed me with milk
  Long after the others were dry, she was like a mother to me,
  when I might have starved.
  
  She loved me, I know.
  
  But even the udders are torn.
  
  Her name, Onorio, was Frannie.
  
  "
  She turned and said, "Poor Leader.
  
  Can you come now?
  
  Come Fern, come Fay, come Tiny, we have to go on.
  
  Come Saul.
  
  "
  Vasquez begged her to turn again
  And stay at his father's place in the canyon
  Until she was well.
  
  She had to go on, she answered.
  
  And Vasquez: "My father is withered up with old age but he'd
  be kind; and my brothers
  Would be your brothers.
  
  There's pasture for the sheep.
  
  We're
  only a sort of Indians but we can be kind.
  
  Come, Clare.
  
  The place is pleasant and alone, up the deep canyon, beside the
  old quarry and the kilns where they burnt the lime.
  
  A hundred laborers used to live there, but now the woods have
  grown back, the cabins are standing empty,
  The roads are gone.
  
  I think the old masonry kilns are beautiful,
  standing like towers in the deep forest,
  But cracked and leaning, and maidenhair fern grows from the
  cracks.
  
  The creek makes music below.
  
  Come, Clare.
  
  It is deep with peace.
  
  When I have to go about and work on
  men's farms for wages I long for that place
  Like some one thinking of water in deserts.
  
  Sometimes we hear
  the sea's thunder, far down the deep gorge.
  
  The darkness under the trees in spring is starry with flowers,
  with redwood sorrel, colt's foot, wakerobin,
  The slender-stemmed pale yellow violets,
  And Solomon's seal that makes intense islands of fragrance in
  April.
  
  " "Oh, April," she said trembling,
  "How exactly it follows.
  
  How could I rest?
  
  Ah, no,
  Good-by, good-by, Onorio.
  
  Poor Leader, I am sure
  We can go a little way before dark.
  
  Come, Saul, Saul.
  
  "
  She ran a few steps, panting hard.
  
  Vasquez perceived
  No hope of staying her: "Then I'll go back to the bridge
  And fetch my horse and my coat.
  
  I'll not leave you, Clare.
  
  "
  He went slowly, heavy and amazed.
  
  His horse
  Had broken tether in the night, stung by the hailstones.
  
  Then Vasquez, still drunken with the dregs of his vision
  To fatalist indifference, went hunting the horse
  And found it late.
  
  He followed Clare the next morning,
  But met another vision on the road, that waved
  Impatient white hands against his passage, saying
  "If I go up to Calvary ten million times: what is that to you?
  
  Let me go up.
  
  " Vasquez drew rein and sat staring.
  
  He saw beyond the vision in the yellow mud
  Prints of bare feet, dibbled about with many
  Little crowding hoof-marks; he marveled, feeling no sadness
  But lonely thoughts.
  
  XII
  Clare Walker had crossed the ridge and
  gone down
  To the mouth of Cawdor's Canyon.
  
  Japanese tenants
  Now kept the house; short broad-faced men who planted
  Lettuces in the garden against the creek-side
  And beans on the hill.
  
  The barns were vacant, the cattle
  Were vanished from the high pastures.
  
  The men were friendly,
  Clare begged at their hands a little oil to soften
  The bandage on Leader's wound; she'd torn her spent dress
  In strips to bind it, and went now without clothing
  But the long brown cloak.
  
  She went northward, and on a foreland
  Found vacant cabins around a ruined saw-mill;
  And finding sacks of dry straw with a worn blankec
  In one of the cabins, slept well and awoke refreshed
  To travel on slowly northward in the glad sunlight
  And sparkle of the sea.
  
  But the next day was dark,
  And one of the wethers died, she never knew why,
  She wept and went on.
  
  Near Point Lobos, by a gate
  Where Tamar Cauldwell used to lean from her white pony
  To swing the bars, the lion-stricken ewe, Leader,
  Groaned and lay down and died.
  
  Clare met much kindness there;
  She was nursed in the house, helpless, for many days,
  And the sheep were guarded and fed.
  
  The people clothed her
  And calmed her wild mind; but she was not willing to tell them
  Her griefs nor her cause of fear.
  
  They kept her by watchful force
  Until she escaped, a great night of moonlight, and fled
  With her small flock.
  
  Far up the Carmel Valley
  The river became a brook, she watched a salmon
  Row its worn body up-stream over the stones
  And struck by a thwart current expose the bruised
  White belly to the white of the sky, gashed with red wounds,
  but right itself
  And wriggle up-stream, having that within it, spirit or desire,
  Will spend all its dear flesh and all the power it has gathered, in
  the sweet salt pastures and fostering ocean,
  To find the appointed high-place and perish.
  
  Clare Walker, in
  a bright moment's passage of anxious feeling,
  Knowing nothing of its fate saw her own fate reflected.
  
  She
  drank, and the sheep drank; they went up the valley
  And crossed, the next day, among the long-needled pines, the
  great thirsty sky-ridge.
  
  In the valley beyond
  Clare journeyed northward again, anxiously avoiding
  The traveled roads and hiding herself from people
  In fear that some one's force or kindness might steal her
  From the helpless flock; and later in habitual fear.
  
  She was seen much later, heavily swollen
  Toward child-birth, cowering from a thin April rain
  By a little fire on the San Joaquin river-bank,
  Sharing a camp of outcast men; no sheep
  Remained with her, but when she moved in the morning
  She called the names of many, Fern, Fay and Leader,
  Nosie and Saul and little Hornie and the others,
  "Dear Tiny, dear Frannie, come on, we have to go on.
  
  "
  The toothless tramp bandaging his foot by the fire
  Looked up with a flicker of light in his slack face,
  And the sickly sullen boy on the other side
  Smiled without mockery.
  
  Clare had gone half a mile
  And felt a grinding pang in her back, she clung to the fence
  And saw the poplars planted along the road
  Reach dreadfully away northward.
  
  When the pain ended
  She went on northward; but after the second pain
  She crept down to the river and hid her body
  In a willow thicket.
  
  In the evening, between the rapid
  Summits of agony before exhaustion, she called
  The sheep about her and perceived that none came.

• The Low Sky Read Poem Log in to favourite

  No vulture is here, hardly a hawk,
  Could long wings or great eyes fly
  Under this low-lidded soft sky?
  
  On the wide heather the curlew's whistle
  Dies of its echo, it has no room
  Under the low lid of this tomb.
  
  But one to whom mind and imagination
  Sometimes used to seem burdensome
  Is glad to lie down awhile in the tomb.
  
  Among stones and quietness
  The mind dissolves without a sound,
  The flesh drops into the ground.

• The Machine Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The little biplane that has the river-meadow for landing-field
  And carries passengers brief rides,
  Buzzed overhead on the tender blue above the orange of sundown.
  
  Below it five troubled night-herons
  Turned short over the shore from its course, four east, one northward.
  
  Beyond them
  Swam the new moon in amber.
  
  I don't know why, but lately the forms of things appear to me with time
  One of their visible dimensions.
  
  The thread brightness of the bent moon appeared enormous, unnumbered
  Ages of years; the night-herons
  Their natural size, they have croaked over the shore in the hush at sundown
  Much longer than human language
  Has fumbled with the air: but the plane having no past but a certain future,
  Insect in size as in form,
  Was also accepted, all these forms of power placed without preference
  In the grave arrangement of the evening.

• The Maid's Thought Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.
  
  The west wind is dead, the waves
  Forget to hate the cliff, in the upland canyons
  Whole hillsides burst aglow
  With golden broom.
  
  Dear how it rained last month,
  And every pool was rimmed
  With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.
  
  Now tall and slender suddenly
  The stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks,
  The pencilled ones on the hill;
  This deerweed shivers with gold, the white globe-tulips
  Blow out their silky bubbles,
  But in the next glen bronze-bells nod, the does
  Scalded by some hot longing
  Can hardly set their pointed hoofs to expect
  Love but they crush a flower;
  Shells pair on the rock, birds mate, the moths fly double.
  
  O it Is time for us now
  Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies
  To make that burning flower.

• The Old Man’s Dream After He Died Read Poem Log in to favourite

  from CAWDOR
  Gently with delicate mindless fingers
  Decomposition began to pick and caress the unstable chemistry
  Of the cells of the brain; Oh very gently, as the first weak breath
  of wind in a wood: the storm is still far,
  The leaves are stirred faintly to a gentle whispering: the nerve-cells,
  by what would soon destroy them, were stirred
  To a gentle whispering.
  
  Or one might say the brain began to
  glow, with its own light, in the starless
  Darkness under the dead bone sky; like bits of rotting wood on
  the floor of the night forest
  Warm rains have soaked, you see them beside the path shine like
  vague eyes.
  
  So gently the dead man's brain
  Glowing by itself made and enjoyed its dream.
  
  The nights of many
  years before this time
  He had been dreaming the sweetness of death, as a starved man
  dreams bread, but now decomposition
  Reversed the chemistry; who had adored in sleep under so many
  disguises the dark redeemer
  In death across a thousand metaphors of form and action celebrated
  life.
  
  Whatever he had wanted
  To do or become was now accomplished, each bud that had been
  nipped and fallen grew out to a branch,
  Sparks of desire forty years quenched flamed up fulfilment.
  
  Out of time, undistracted by the nudging pulse-beat, perfectly
  real to itself being insulated
  From all touch of reality the dream triumphed, building from
  past experience present paradise
  More intense as the decay quickened, but ever more primitive
  as it proceeded, until the ecstasy
  Soared through a flighty carnival of wines and women to the
  simple delight of eating flesh, and tended
  Even higher, to an unconditional delight.
  
  But then the interconnections
  between the groups of the brain
  Failing, the dreamer and the dream split into multitude.
  
  Soon the
  altered cells became unfit to express
  Any human or at all describable form of consciousness.
  
  Pain and
  pleasure are not to be thought
  Important enough to require balancing: these flashes of pos-tmortal
  felicity by mindless decay
  Played on the breaking harp by no means countervalued the excess
  of previous pain.
  
  Such discords
  In the passionate terms of human experience are not resolved,
  nor worth it.

• The Place For No Story Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The coast hills at Sovranes Creek:
  No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
  Over rock shaped like flame;
  The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast
  Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
  A herd of cows and the bull
  Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
  And the gray air haunted with hawks:
  This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.
  
  No imaginable
  Human presence here could do anything
  But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.

• The Purse-Seine Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark
  of the moon; daylight or moonlight
  They could not tell where to spread the net,
  unable to see the phosphorescence of the
  shoals of fish.
  
  They work northward from Monterey, coasting
  Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off
  Pigeon Point
  The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color
  light on the sea's night-purple; he points,
  and the helmsman
  Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the
  gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.
  
  They close the circle
  And purse the bottom of the net, then with great
  labor haul it in.
  
  I cannot tell you
  How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible,
  then, when the crowded fish
  Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall
  to the other of their closing destiny the
  phosphorescent
  Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body
  sheeted with flame, like a live rocket
  A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside
  the narrowing
  Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up
  to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls
  of night
  Stand erect to the stars.
  
  Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
  On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light:
  how could I help but recall the seine-net
  Gathering the luminous fish?
  
  I cannot tell you how
  beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
  
  I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
  into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now
  There is no escape.
  
  We have gathered vast populations incapable
  of free survival, insulated
  From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
  dependent.
  
  The circle is closed, and the net
  Is being hauled in.
  
  They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet
  they shine already.
  
  The inevitable mass-disasters
  Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we
  and our children
  Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all
  powers—or revolution, and the new government
  Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls—or anarchy,
  the mass-disasters.
  
  These things are Progress;
  Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
  its reason?
  
  Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
  In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,
  splintered gleams, crackled laughter.
  
  But they are
  quite wrong.
  
  There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew
  that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

• The Silent Shepherds Read Poem Log in to favourite

  What's the best life for a man?
  
  —Never to have been born, sings the choros, and the next best
  Is to die young.
  
  I saw the Sybil at Cumae
  Hung in her cage over the public street—
  What do you want, Sybil?
  
  I want to die.
  
  Apothanein Thelo.
  
  Apothanein Thelo.
  
  Apothanein Thelo.
  
  You have got your wish.
  
  But I meant life, not death.
  
  What's the best life for a man?
  
  To ride in the wind.
  
  To ride
  horses and herd cattle
  In solitary places above the ocean on the beautiful mountain,
  and come home hungry in the evening
  And eat and sleep.
  
  He will live in the wild wind and quick rain,
  he will not ruin his eyes with reading,
  Nor think too much.
  
  However, we must have philosophers.
  
  I will have shepherds for my philosophers,
  Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night
  Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep.
  
  And I'll have
  lunatics
  For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting
  The country news into supernaturalism—
  For all men to such minds are devils or gods—and that increases
  Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies
  Best told by fools.
  
  I will have no lawyers nor constables
  Each man guard his own goods: there will be manslaughter,
  But no more wars, no more mass-sacrifice.
  
  Nor I'll have no doctors,
  Except old women gathering herbs on the mountain,
  Let each have her sack of opium to ease the death-pains.
  
  That would be a good world, free and out-doors.
  
  But the vast hungry spirit of the time
  Cries to his chosen that there is nothing good
  Except discovery, experiment and experience and discovery: To look
  truth in the eyes,
  To strip truth naked, let our dogs do our living for us
  But man discover.
  
  It is a fine ambition,
  But the wrong tools.
  
  Science and mathematics
  Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
  They never touch it: consider what an explosion
  Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky
  the world
  If any mind for a moment touch truth.

• The Songs Of The Dead Men To The Three Dancers Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I.
  
  TO DESIRE
  (Here a dancer enters and dances.
  
  )
  Who is she that is fragrant and desirable,
  Clothed but enough to wake wantonness,
  And proud of her polished lithe body and her narrowing of
  kohl-darkened eyelids with arrows between them?
  
  Ah, ah, ah! Goddess of the world,
  Young serpent in the veins of the rock,
  In the mountain of jewels a young serpent, in the veins of a
  man a sweet viper all emerald: ah Goddess
  Are we proof to the hilt, are you pleased with us
  When the splendor of your undulant insolence
  Pricks the dark entrails of death, his foregathered grow hot for
  you, the skeleton stands up to be amorous?
  
  Ah, ah, ah! Goddess of the flesh
  Will you think it a gift lacking grace
  That the gates of the grave have been battered before you, the
  iron doors to us dead in the deepest abysm?
  
  For who has gone down to the dead or has touched them?
  
  Did Jesus of Nazareth when he lay in deep hell
  For three days and since lived as they say and has failed us?
  
  No man nor no woman has gone down to us dead
  Living until now, but the proof is here now, ah beautiful torture
  us again and again.
  
  We are fleshless, we tremble to your flesh,
  Dear Goddess to taste of the dew
  On your arms when you dance or to lip at the glitter of your
  burnished thighs or the breast of your barrenness.
  
  In the book of your triumphs with no term
  Inscribe a more wonderful deed,
  That you quickened the dead, that you lifted the flesh of the
  fleshless, ah Goddess, ah! dancing, us dead men.
  
  (The dancer goes out.
  
  )
  II.
  
  TO DEATH
  (A second dancer enters and dances.
  
  )
  Was it lovely to lie among violets ablossom in the valleys of
  love on the breast of the south?
  
  It was lovely but lovelier now
  To behold the calm head of the dancer we dreaded, his curls are
  as tendrils of the vineyard, O Death
  Sweet and more sweet is your dancing.
  
  Like the swoon of fulfilment of love in some lonelier vale among
  flowers is the languor that flushes us,
  O why did we fear him, for Death
  Is a beautiful youth and his eyes are sleepy, the lids droop heavily
  with wine when he wakens,
  And his breast is more smooth than a dove's.
  
  Fair Garda, gay water with olives engarlanded, lake of blue
  laughter in a bay of the Alps
  It is better for our spirits to be here
  In the desolate hollows of darkness beholding the beauty of our
  dancer than at rest on your hills
  Of anemones and jonquils immingled.
  
  And gay from the glacier womb, boy-throated for gladness to
  shout where the snow-crags throng
  Ran foaming the rivulet Rhone,
  When the mountains were sprung for his passage, the ridges of
  granite were splintered; and lovely the lake was
  Under the vineyards of Vaud,
  And at evening empurpling the peaks of the Chablais were
  painted on the sleep and deep shadow of its waters
  When the sundown was flame on la Dole.
  
  But the best of the course is the last broad slumber, O river of
  France to forget and go down
  Slow-gliding and sultrily stagnant
  Past Aries to the Gulf of the Lion and that azure and beautiful
  grave in the waves of the south
  That are warmest and best .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and an end .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (The dancer has gone out.
  
  )
  III.
  
  TO VICTORY
  (A third dancer enters and dances.
  
  )
  Use us again, you in the world only of goddesses worshipful
  now or adored,
  Helmeted victory!
  How did we bow, even in dream, visions betraying us, unto some
  other and base
  Power when your splendor there
  Struck on the gates?
  
  Use us again, awfully beautiful.
  
  Blood will
  reblossom from death
  Burning to minister
  All its revived fire at your feet, only to merit an eye-glance, or
  flash of your hand's
  Gauntleted majesty.
  
  Pounding of guns clear you a path, trample the ports of decision
  and triumph on the slain.
  
  Men when they fall in it
  Gayly they die, scattering for flowers rosy and white at your
  feet the red blood and pale brains
  Carpeting battlefields.
  
  Towering in steel, terribly armed, which of the daughters of
  heaven is so hotly desired?
  
  None has embraced you yet,
  All of us burn, beautifully mad, frantic with lust of your beauty
  and with thirst of your mouth's
  Terrible maidenhood;
  Holy and white, under the steel, hide the sweet limbs of our
  longing desire in a deep
  Sacred virginity.
  
  Emperors and lords gave her in vain cities of gold and whole
  nations of blood, for she took
  Gifts, but rejected them.
  
  Neither a king's bribe nor a bold armorer's hammer prevails to
  unrivet the steel
  Belt of her maidenhood,
  Yet shall our prayer surely be heard.
  
  Goddess of glory revoke our
  exemption of death,
  Twice let us die for you.
  
  Use us again, though but an hour: surely the prayer is as humble
  as the gift would be great,
  Helmeted Victory.
  
  (The dancer goes out.
  
  )

• The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Unhappy about some far off things
  That are not my affair, wandering
  Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
  I saw in the evening
  The stars go over the lonely ocean,
  And a black-maned wild boar
  Plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.
  
  The old monster snuffled, "Here are sweet roots,
  Fat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.
  
  The best nation in Europe has fallen,
  And that is Finland,
  But the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
  The old black-bristled boar,
  Tearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain.
  
  "The world's in a bad way, my man,
  And bound to be worse before it mends;
  Better lie up in the mountain here
  Four or five centuries,
  While the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
  Said the old father of wild pigs,
  Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.
  
  "Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
  And the dogs that talk revolution,
  Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
  
  I believe in my tusks.
  
  Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,"
  Said the gamey black-maned boar
  Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

• The Summit Redwood Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Only stand high a long enough time your lightning
  will come; that is what blunts the peaks of
  redwoods;
  But this old tower of life on the hilltop has taken
  it more than twice a century, this knows in
  every
  Cell the salty and the burning taste, the shudder
  and the voice.
  
  The fire from heaven; it has
  felt the earth's too
  Roaring up hill in autumn, thorned oak-leaves tossing
  their bright ruin to the bitter laurel-leaves,
  and all
  Its under-forest has died and died, and lives to be
  burnt; the redwood has lived.
  
  Though the fire
  entered,
  It cored the trunk while the sapwood increased.
  
  The
  trunk is a tower, the bole of the trunk is a
  black cavern,
  The mast of the trunk with its green boughs the
  mountain stars are strained through
  Is like the helmet-spike on the highest head of an
  army; black on lit blue or hidden in cloud
  It is like the hill's finger in heaven.
  
  And when the
  cloud hides it, though in barren summer, the
  boughs
  Make their own rain.
  
  Old Escobar had a cunning trick
  when he stole beef.
  
  He and his grandsons
  Would drive the cow up here to a starlight death and
  hoist the carcass into the tree's hollow,
  Then let them search his cabin he could smile for
  pleasure, to think of his meat hanging secure
  Exalted over the earth and the ocean, a theft like a
  star, secret against the supreme sky.

• The Tower Beyond Tragedy Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  You'd never have thought the Queen was Helen's sister- Troy's
  burning-flower from Sparta, the beautiful sea-flower
  Cut in clear stone, crowned with the fragrant golden mane, she
  the ageless, the uncontaminable-
  This Clytemnestra was her sister, low-statured, fierce-lipped, not
  dark nor blonde, greenish-gray-eyed,
  Sinewed with strength, you saw, under the purple folds of the
  queen-cloak, but craftier than queenly,
  Standing between the gilded wooden porch-pillars, great steps of
  stone above the steep street,
  Awaiting the King.
  
  Most of his men were quartered on the town;
  he, clanking bronze, with fifty
  And certain captives, came to the stair.
  
  The Queen's men were
  a hundred in the street and a hundred
  Lining the ramp, eighty on the great flags of the porch; she
  raising her white arms the spear-butts
  Thundered on the stone, and the shields clashed; eight shining
  clarions
  Let fly from the wide window over the entrance the wildbirds of
  their metal throats, air-cleaving
  Over the King come home.
  
  He raised his thick burnt-colored
  beard and smiled; then Clytemnestra,
  Gathering the robe, setting the golden-sandaled feet carefully,
  stone by stone, descended
  One half the stair.
  
  But one of the captives marred the comeliness
  of that embrace with a cry
  Gull-shrill, blade-sharp, cutting between the purple cloak and
  the bronze plates, then Clytemnestra:
  Who was it?
  
  The King answered: A piece of our goods out of
  the snatch of Asia, a daughter of the king,
  So treat her kindly and she may come into her wits again.
  
  Eh,
  you keep state here my queen.
  
  You've not been the poorer for me.
  
  - In heart, in the widowed
  chamber, dear, she pale replied, though the slaves
  Toiled, the spearmen were faithful.
  
  What's her name, the slavegirl's?
  
  AGAMEMNON   Come up the stair.
  
  They tell me my kinsman's
  Lodged himself on you.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Your cousin Aegisthus?
  
  He was out of refuge,
  flits between here and Tiryns.
  
  Dear: the girl's name?
  
  AGAMEMNON   Cassandra.
  
  We've a hundred or so other
  captives; besides two hundred
  Rotted in the hulls, they tell odd stories about you and your
  guest: eh?
  
  no matter: the ships
  Ooze pitch and the August road smokes dirt, I smell like an
  old shepherd's goatskin, you'll have bath-water?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  They're making it hot.
  
  Come, my lord.
  
  My hands will pour it.
  
  (They enter the palace.
  
  )
  CASSANDRA
  In the holy city,
  In Troy, when the stone was standing walls and the ash
  Was painted and carved wood and pictured curtains,
  And those lived that are dead, they had caged a den
  Of wolves out of the mountain, and I a maiden
  Was led to see them: it stank and snarled,
  The smell was the smell here, the eyes were the eyes
  Of steep Mycenae: O God guardian of wanderers
  Let me die easily.
  
  So cried Cassandra the daughter of King Priam, treading the steps
  of the palace at Mycenae.
  
  Swaying like a drunken woman, drunk with the rolling of the
  ship, and with tears, and with prophecy.
  
  The stair may yet be seen, among the old stones that are Mycenae;
  tall dark Cassandra, the prophetess,
  The beautiful girl with whom a God bargained for love, high-nurtured,
  captive, shamefully stained
  With the ship's filth and the sea's, rolled her dark head upon her
  shoulders like a drunken woman
  And trod the great stones of the stair.
  
  The captives, she among
  them, were ranked into a file
  On the flagged porch, between the parapet and the spearmen.
  
  The people below shouted for the King,
  King Agamemnon, returned conqueror, after the ten years of
  battle and death in Asia.
  
  Then cried Cassandra:
  Good spearmen you did not kill my father, not you
  Violated my mother with the piercing
  That makes no life in the womb, not you defiled
  My tall blond brothers with the masculine lust
  That strikes its loved one standing,
  And leaves him what no man again nor a girl
  Ever will gaze upon with the eyes of desire:
  Therefore you'll tell me
  Whether it's an old custom in the Greek country
  The cow goring the bull, break the inner door back
  And see in what red water how cloaked your King
  Bathes, and my brothers are avenged a little.
  
  One said: Captive be quiet.
  
  And she: What have I to be quiet for,
  you will not believe me.
  
  Such wings my heart spreads when the red runs out of any
  Greek, I must let the bird fly.
  
  O soldiers
  He that mishandled me dies! The first, one of your two brute
  Aj axes, that threw me backward
  On the temple flagstones, a hard bride-bed, I enduring him
  heard the roofs of my city breaking,
  The roar of flames and spearmen: what came to Ajax?
  
  Out of a
  cloud the loud-winged falcon lightning
  Came on him shipwrecked, clapped its wings about him, clung
  to him, the violent flesh burned and the bones
  Broke from each other in that passion; and now this one, returned
  safe, the Queen is his lightning.
  
  While she yet spoke a slave with haggard eyes darted from the
  door; there were hushed cries and motions
  In the inner dark of the great hall.
  
  Then the Queen Clytemnestra
  issued, smiling.
  
  She drew
  Her cloak up, for the brooch on the left shoulder was broken; the
  fillet of her hair had come unbound;
  Yet now she was queenly at length; and standing at the stair-head
  spoke: Men of Mycenae, I have made
  Sacrifice for the joy this day has brought to us, the King come
  home, the enemy fallen, fallen,
  In the ashes of Asia.
  
  I have made sacrifice.
  
  I made the prayer
  with my own lips, and struck the bullock
  With my own hand.
  
  The people murmured together, She's not
  a priestess, the Queen is not a priestess,
  What has she done there, what wild sayings
  Make wing in the Queen's throat?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   I have something to tell you.
  
  Too much joy is a message-bearer of misery.
  
  A little is good; but come too much and it devours us.
  
  Therefore
  we give of a great harvest
  Sheaves to the smiling Gods; and therefore out of a full cup we
  pour the quarter.
  
  No man
  Dare take all that God sends him, whom God favors, or destruction
  Rides into the house in the last basket.
  
  I have been twelve years
  your shepherdess, I the Queen have ruled you
  And I am accountable for you.
  
  CASSANDRA
  Why should a man kill his own mother?
  
  The cub of the lion being grown
  Will fight with the lion, but neither lion nor wolf
  Nor the unclean jackal
  Bares tooth against the womb that he dropped out of:
  Yet I have seen
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Strike that captive woman with your hand, spearman; and then
  if the spirit
  Of the she-wolf in her will not quiet, with the butt of the spear.
  
  CASSANDRA   -the blade in the child's hand
  Enter the breast that the child sucked-that woman's-
  The left breast that the robe has dropped from, for the brooch is
  broken,
  That very hillock of whiteness, and she crying, she kneeling
  (The spearman 'who is nearest CASSANDRA covers her mouth
  twith his hand.
  
  )
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  My sister's beauty entered Troy with too much gladness.
  
  They
  forgot to make sacrifice.
  
  Therefore destruction entered; therefore the daughters of Troy
  cry out in strange dispersals, and this one
  Grief has turned mad.
  
  I will not have that horror march under
  the Lion-gate of Mycenae
  That split the citadel of Priam.
  
  Therefore I say I have made
  sacrifice; I have subtracted
  A fraction from immoderate joy.
  
  For consider, my people,
  How unaccountably God has favored the city and brought home
  the army.
  
  King Agamemnon,
  My dear, my husband, my lord and yours,
  Is yet not such a man as the Gods love; but insolent, fierce, overbearing,
  whose folly
  Brought many times many great evils
  On all the heads and fighting hopes of the Greek force.
  
  Why,
  even before the fleet made sail,
  While yet it gathered on Boeotian Aulis, this man offended.
  
  He
  slew one of the deer
  Of the sacred herd of Artemis, out of pure impudence, hunter's
  pride that froths in a young boy
  Laying nock to string of his first bow: this man, grown, a grave
  king, leader of the Greeks.
  
  The angry Goddess
  Blew therefore from the horn of the Trojan shore storm without
  end, no slackening, no turn, no slumber
  Of the eagle bound to break the oars of the fleet and split the
  hulls venturing: you know what answer
  Calchas the priest gave: his flesh must pay whose hand did the
  evil-his flesh! mine also.
  
  His?
  
  My daughter.
  
  They knew that of my three there was one that I loved.
  
  Blameless white maid, my Iphigenia, whose throat the knife,
  Whose delicate soft throat the thing that cuts sheep open was
  drawn across by a priest's hand
  And the soft-colored lips drained bloodless
  That had clung here-here- Oh!
  (Drawing the robe from her breasts.
  
  )
  These feel soft, townsmen; these are red at the tips, they have
  neither blackened nor turned marble.
  
  King Agamemnon hoped to pillow his black-haired breast upon
  them, my husband, that mighty conqueror,
  Come home with glory.
  
  He thought they were still a woman's,
  they appear a woman's.
  
  I'll tell you something.
  
  Since fawn slaughtered for slaughtered fawn evened the debt
  these that feel soft and warm are wounding ice,
  They ache with their hardness .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Shall I go on and count the other follies of the King?
  
  The
  insolences to God and man
  That brought down plague, and brought Achilles' anger against
  the army?
  
  Yet God brought home a remnant
  Against all hope: therefore rejoice.
  
  But lest too much rejoicing slay us I have made sacrifice.
  
  A little
  girl's brought you over the sea.
  
  What could be great enough for safe return?
  
  A sheep's death?
  
  A bull's?
  
  What thank-offering?
  
  All these captives, battered from the ships, bruised with captivity,
  damaged flesh and forlorn minds?
  
  God requires wholeness in the victim.
  
  You dare not think what
  he demands.
  
  I dared.
  
  I, I,
  Dared.
  
  Men of the Argolis, you that went over the sea and you that
  guarded the home coasts
  And high stone war-belts of the cities: remember how many
  spearmen these twelve years have called me
  Queen, and have loved me, and been faithful, and remain faithful.
  
  What I bring you is accomplished.
  
  VOICES
  King Agamemnon.
  
  The King.
  
  We will hear the King.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   What I bring you is accomplished.
  
  Accept it, the cities are at peace, the ways are safe between
  them, the Gods favor us.
  
  Refuse it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You will not refuse it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  VOICES   The King.
  
  We will hear the King.
  
  Let
  us see the King.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  You will not refuse it; I have my faithful They would run, the
  red rivers,
  From the gate and by the graves through every crooked street
  of the great city, they would run in the pasture
  Outside the walls: and on this stair: stemmed at this entrance-
  CASSANDRA
  Ah, sister, do you also behold visions?
  
  I was watching red
  water-
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Be wise, townsmen.
  
  As for the King: slaves will bring him to you
  when he has bathed; you will see him.
  
  The slaves will carry him on a litter, he has learned Asian ways in
  Asia, too great a ruler
  To walk, like common spearmen.
  
  CASSANDRA   Who is that, standing behind
  you, Clytemnestra?
  
  What God
  Dark in the doorway?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Deal you with your own demons.
  
  You
  know what I have done, captive.
  
  You know
  I am holding lions with my two eyes: if I turn and loose
  them .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  CASSANDRA   It is .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the King.
  
  There! There! Ah!
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Or of I should make any move to increase confusion.
  
  If I should
  say for example, Spearman
  Kill that woman.
  
  I cannot say it this moment; so little as from
  one spear wound in your body
  A trickle would loose them on us.
  
  CASSANDRA   Yet he stands behind you.
  
  A-ah! I can bear it.
  
  I have seen much lately
  Worse.
  
  A CAPTAIN   (down the stair; standing forward from his men)
  O Queen, there is no man in the world, but one (if that one
  lives), may ask you to speak
  Otherwise than you will.
  
  You have spoken in riddles to the
  people .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  CASSANDRA   Not me! Why will you choose
  Me! I submitted to you living, I was forced, you entered me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  THE CAPTAIN   Also there was a slave here,
  Whose eyes stood out from his chalk face, came buzzing from
  the palace postern gate, whimpering
  A horrible thing.
  
  I killed him.
  
  But the men have heard it.
  
  CASSANDRA   You were the king, I was your slave.
  
  Here you see, here, I took the black-haired breast of the bull,
  I endured it, I opened my thighs, I suffered
  The other thing besides death that you Greeks have to give
  us .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  THE CAPTAIN   Though this one raves and you are silent,
  Queen, terrible-eyed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  CASSANDRA   That was the slave's part: but this
  time .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  dead King .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  will .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  not submit.
  
  Ah! Ah! No!
  If you will steal the body of someone living take your wife's,
  take that soldier's there
  THE CAPTAIN
  I pray you Queen command the captive woman be quieted in a
  stone chamber; she increases confusion,
  The soldiers cannot know some terrible thing may not have
  happened; you men and the King's grin
  Like wolves over the kill, the whole city totters on a swordedge
  over sudden
  CASSANDRA (screaming)
  Drive him off me! Pity, pity!
  I have no power; I thought when he was dead another man would
  use me, your Greek custom,
  Not he, he, newly slain.
  
  He is driving me out, he enters, he possesses, this is my last defilement.
  
  Ah .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Greeks .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Pity Cassandra!
  With the voice the spirit seemed to fly out.
  
  She upflung her shining
  Arms with the dreadful and sweet gesture of a woman surrendering
  utterly to force and love,
  She in the eyes of the people, like a shameless woman, and fell
  writhing, and the dead King's soul
  Entered her body.
  
  In that respite the Queen:
  Captain: and you,
  soldiers, that shift unsoldierly
  The weapons that should be upright, at attention, like stiff
  grass-blades: and you, people of Mycenae:
  While this one maddened, and you muttered, echoing together,
  and you, soldier, with anxious questions
  Increased confusion: who was it that stood firm, who was it that
  stood silent, who was it that held
  With her two eyes the whole city from splitting wide asunder?
  
  Your Queen was it?
  
  I am your Queen,
  And now I will answer what you asked.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It is true.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  He
  has died.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I am the Queen.
  
  My little son Orestes will grow up and govern you.
  
  While she
  spoke the body of Cassandra
  Arose among the shaken spears, taller than the spears, and stood
  among the waving spears
  Stone-quiet, like a high war-tower in a windy pinewood, but
  deadly to look at, with blind and tyrannous
  Eyes; and the Queen: All is accomplished; and if you are wise,
  people of Mycenae: quietness is wisdom.
  
  No tumult will call home a dead man out of judgment.
  
  The end
  is the end.
  
  Ah, soldiers! Down spears!
  What, now Troy's fallen you think there's not a foreigner in
  the world bronze may quench thirst on?
  
  Lion-cubs,
  If you will tear each other in the lair happy the wolves, happy
  the hook-nose vultures.
  
  Call the eaters of carrion?
  
  I am your Queen, I am speaking to
  you, you will hear me out before you whistle
  The foul beaks from the mountain nest.
  
  I tell you I will forget
  mercy if one man moves now.
  
  I rule you, I.
  
  The Gods have satisfied themselves in this man's death; there
  shall not one drop of the blood of the city
  Be shed further.
  
  I say the high Gods are content; as for the
  lower,
  And the great ghost of the King: my slaves will bring out the
  King's body decently before you
  And set it here, in the eyes of the city: spices the ships bring from
  the south will comfort his spirit;
  Mycenae and Tiryns and the shores will mourn him aloud; sheep
  will be slain for him; a hundred beeves
  Spill their thick blood into the trenches; captives and slaves go
  down to serve him, yes all these captives
  Burn in the ten-day fire with him, unmeasured wine quench it,
  urned in pure gold the gathered ashes
  Rest forever in the sacred rock; honored; a conqueror.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Slaves, bring the King out of the house.
  
  Alas my husband! she cried, clutching the brown strands of her
  hair in both her hands, you have left me
  A woman among lions! Ah, the King's power, ah the King's
  victories! Weep for me, Mycenae!
  Widowed of the King!
  The people stood amazed, like sheep that
  snuff at their dead shepherd, some hunter's
  Ill-handled arrow having struck him from the covert, all by
  mischance; he is fallen on the hillside
  Between the oak-shadow and the stream; the sun burns his dead
  face, his staff lies by him, his dog
  Licks his hand, whining.
  
  So, like sheep, the people
  Regarded that dead majesty whom the slaves brought out of the
  house on a gold bed, and set it
  Between the pillars of the porch.
  
  His royal robe covered his
  wounds, there was no stain
  Nor discomposure.
  
  Then that captain who had spoken before:
  O Queen, before the mourning
  The punishment: tell us who has done this.
  
  She raised her head,
  and not a woman but a lioness
  Blazed at him from her eyes: Dog, she answered, dog of the
  army,
  Who said Speak dog, and you dared speak?
  
  Justice is mine.
  
  Then he was silent; but Cassandra's
  Body standing tall among the spears, over the parapet, her body
  but not her spirit
  Cried with a man's voice: Shall not even the stones of the stair,
  shall not the stones under the columns
  Speak, and the towers of the great wall of my city come down
  against the murderess?
  
  O Mycenae
  I yearned to night and day under the tents by Troy, O Tiryns,
  O Mycenae, the door
  Of death, and the gate before the door!
  CLYTEMNESTRA   That woman lies, or the
  spirit of a lie cries from her.
  
  Spearman,
  Kill that woman!
  But Cassandra's body set its back against the
  parapet, its face
  Terribly fronting the raised knife; and called the soldier by his
  name, in the King's voice, saying
  Sheathe it; and the knife lowered, and the soldier
  Fell on his knees before the King in the woman's body; and the
  body of Cassandra cried from the parapet:
  Horrible things, horrible things this house has witnessed: but here
  is the most vile, that hundreds
  Of spears are idle while the murderess, Clytemnestra the murderess,
  the snake that came upon me
  Naked and bathing, the death that lay with me in bed, the death
  that has borne children to me,
  Stands there unslain.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Cowards, if the bawling of that bewildered
  heifer from Troy fields has frightened you
  How did you bear the horns of her brothers?
  
  Bring her to me.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA
  Let no man doubt, men of Mycenae,
  She has yet the knife hid in her clothes, the very blade that
  stabbed her husband and the blood is on it.
  
  Look, she handles it now.
  
  Look, fellows.
  
  The hand under the
  robe.
  
  Slay her not easily, that she-wolf.
  
  Do her no honor with a spear! Ah! If I could find the word, if
  I could find it,
  The name of her, to say husband-slayer and bed-defiler, bitch
  and wolf-bitch, king's assassin
  And beast, beast, beast, all in one breath, in one word: spearmen
  You would heap your shields over this woman and crush her
  slowly, slowly, while she choked and screamed,
  No, you would peel her bare and on the pavement for a bridebed
  with a spear-butt for husband
  Dig the lewd womb until it burst: this for Agamemnon, this for
  Aegisthus Agh, cowards of the city
  Do you stand quiet?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Truly, soldiers,
  I think it is he verily.
  
  No one could invent the abominable voice,
  the unspeakable gesture,
  The actual raging insolence of the tyrant.
  
  I am the hand ridded
  the Argolis of him.
  
  I here, I killed him, I, justly.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA   You have heard her, you have
  heard her, she has made confession.
  
  Now if she'll show you the knife too
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Here.
  
  I kept it for safety.
  
  And, as that beast said, his blood's yet on it.
  
  Look at it, with so little a key I unlocked the kingdom of destruction.
  
  Stand firm, till a God
  Lead home this ghost to the dark country
  So many Greeks have peopled, through his crimes, his violence,
  his insolence, stand firm till that moment
  And through the act of this hand and of this point no man shall
  suffer anything again forever
  Of Agamemnon.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA
  I say if you let this woman live, this crime go
  unpunished, what man among you
  Will be safe in his bed?
  
  The woman ever envies the man, his
  strength, his freedom, his loves.
  
  Her envy is like a snake beside him, all his life through, her envy
  and hatred: law tames that viper:
  Law dies if the Queen die not: the viper is free then.
  
  It will be poison in your meat or a knife to bleed you sleeping.
  
  They fawn and slaver over us
  And then we are slain.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (to one of the slaves that carried the King’s
  body)
  Is my lord Aegisthus
  Slain on the way?
  
  How long?
  
  How long?
  
  (To the people) He
  came, fat with his crimes.
  
  Greek valor broke down Troy, your valor, soldiers, and the brain
  of Odysseus, the battle-fury of Achilles,
  The stubborn strength of Menelaus, the excellence of you all:
  this dead man here, his pride
  Ruined you a hundred times: he helped nowise, he brought bitter
  destruction: but he gathered your glory
  For the cloak of his shoulders.
  
  I saw him come up the stair, I saw
  my child Iphigenia
  Killed for his crime; I saw his harlot, the captive woman there,
  crying out behind him, I saw .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I saw .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I saw .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  how can I speak what crowd of the dead
  faces of the faithful Greeks,
  Your brothers, dead of his crimes; those that perished of plague
  and those that died in the lost battles
  After he had soured the help of Achilles for another harlot
  those dead faces of your brothers,
  Some black with the death-blood, many trampled under the
  hooves of horses, many spotted with pestilence,
  Flew all about him, all lamenting, all crying out against him,
  horrible horrible I gave them
  Vengeance; and you freedom.
  
  (To the slave) Go up and look,
  for God's sake, go up to the parapets,
  Look toward the mountain.
  
  Bring me word quickly, my strength
  breaks,
  How can I hold all the Argolis with my eyes forever?
  
  I alone?
  
  Hell cannot hold her dead men,
  Keep watch there-send me word by others-go, go!
  (To the people) He
  came triumphing.
  
  Magnificent, abominable, all in bronze.
  
  I brought him to the bath; my hands undid the armor;
  My hands poured out the water;
  Dead faces like flies buzzed all about us;
  He stripped himself before me, loathsome, unclean, with laughter;
  The labors of the Greeks had made him fat, the deaths of the
  faithful had swelled his belly;
  I threw a cloak over him for a net and struck, struck, struck,
  Blindly, in the steam of the bath; he bellowed, netted,
  And bubbled in the water;
  All the stone vault asweat with steam bellowed;
  And I undid the net and the beast was dead, and the broad vessel
  Stank with his blood.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA
  The word! The word! O burning mind of Godr
  If ever I gave you bulls teach me that word, the name for her,
  the name for her!
  A SLAVE (running from the door; to CLYTEMNESTRA)
  My lord.
  
  Aegisthus has come down the mountain, Queen, he
  approaches the Lion-gate.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   It is time.
  
  I am tired now.
  
  Meet him and tell him to come in the postern doorway.
  
  THE CAPTAIN (on the stair: addressing the soldiers and the people
  below)
  Companions: before God, hating the smell of crimes, crushes the
  city into gray ashes
  We must make haste.
  
  Judge now and act.
  
  For the husband-slayer
  I say she must die, let her pay forfeit.
  
  And for the great ghost
  of the King, let all these captives,
  But chiefly the woman Cassandra, the crier in a man's voice there,
  be slain upon his pyre to quiet him.
  
  He will go down to his dark place and God will spare the city.
  
  (To the soldiers above, on the ramp and the porch)
  Comrades: Mycenae is greater
  Than the Queen of Mycenae.
  
  The King is dead: let the Queen
  die: let the city live.
  
  Comrades,
  We suffered something in Asia, on the stranger's coast, laboring
  for you.
  
  We dreamed of home there
  In the bleak wind and drift of battle; we continued ten years,
  laboring and dying; we accomplished
  The task set us; we gathered what will make all the Greek cities
  glorious, a name forever;
  We shared the spoil, taking our share to enrich Mycenae.
  
  O but
  our hearts burned then, O comrades
  But our hearts melted when the great oars moved the ships, the
  water carried us, the blue sea-waves
  Slid under the black keel; I could not see them, I was blind with
  tears, thinking of Mycenae.
  
  We have come home.
  
  Behold the dear streets of our longing,
  The stones that we desired, the steep ways of the city and the
  sacred doorsteps
  Reek and steam with pollution, the accursed vessel
  Spills a red flood over the floors.
  
  The fountain of it stands there and calls herself the Queen.
  
  No
  Queen, no Queen, that husband-slayer,
  A common murderess.
  
  Comrades join us
  We will make clean the city and sweeten it before God.
  
  We
  will mourn together at the King's burying,
  And a good year will come, we will rejoice together.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Dog, you dare
  something.
  
  Fling no spear, soldiers,
  He has a few fools back of him would attempt the stair if the
  dog were slain: I will have no one
  Killed out of need.
  
  ONE OF HER MEN ON THE PORCH (flinging his spear)
  Not at him: at you
  Murderess!
  But some God, no lover of justice, turned it; the
  great bronze tip grazing her shoulder
  Clanged on the stones behind: the gong of a change in the dance:
  now Clytemnestra, none to help her,
  One against all, swayed raging by the King's corpse, over the
  golden bed: it is said that a fire
  Stood visibly over her head, mixed in the hair, pale flames and
  radiance.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Here am I, thieves, thieves,
  Drunkards, here is my breast, a deep white mark for cowards to
  aim at: kings have lain on it.
  
  No spear yet, heroes, heroes?
  
  See, I have no blemish: the arms are white, the breasts are deep
  and white, the whole body is blemishless:
  You are tired of your brown wives, draw lots for me, rabble,
  thieves, there is loot here, shake the dice, thieves, a game yet!
  One of you will take the bronze and one the silver,
  One the gold, and one me,
  Me Clytemnestra a spoil worth having:
  Kings have kissed me, this dead dog was a king, there is another
  King at the gate: thieves, thieves, would not this shining
  Breast brighten a sad thief's hut, roll in his bed's filth
  Shiningly?
  
  You could teach me to draw water at the fountain,
  A dirty child on the other hip: where are the dice?
  
  Let me
  throw first, if I throw sixes
  I choose my masters: closer you rabble, let me smell you.
  
  Don't fear the knife, it has king's blood on it, I keep it for an
  ornament,
  It has shot its sting.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA   Fools, fools, Strike!
  Are your hands dead?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   You Would see all of me
  Before you choose whether to kill or dirtily cherish?
  
  If what
  the King's used needs commending
  To the eyes of thieves for thieves' use: give me room, give me
  room, fellows, you'll see it is faultless.
  
  The dress .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  there .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA   Fools this wide whore played wife
  When she was going about to murder me the King; you, will
  you let her trip you
  With the harlot's trick?
  
  Strike! Make an end!
  CLYTEMNESTRA   I have not my
  sister's, Troy's flame's beauty, but I have something.
  
  This arm, round, firm, skin without hair, polished like marble:
  the supple-jointed shoulders:
  Men have praised the smooth neck, too,
  The strong clear throat over the deep wide breasts .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA   She is
  buying an hour: sheep: it may be Aegisthus
  Is at the Lion-gate.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   If he were here, Aegisthus,
  I’d not be the pedlar of what trifling charms I have for an
  hour of life yet.
  
  You have wolves' eyes:
  Yet there is something kindly about the blue ones there yours,
  young soldier, young soldier.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The last,
  The under-garment?
  
  You won't buy me yet?
  
  This dead dog,
  The King here, never saw me naked: I had the night for nurse:
  turn his head sideways, the eyes
  Are only half shut.
  
  If I should touch him, and the blood came,
  you'd say I had killed him.
  
  Nobody, nobody,
  Killed him: his pride burst.
  
  Ah, no one has pity!
  I can serve well, I have always envied your women, the public ones.
  
  Who takes me first?
  
  Tip that burnt log onto the flagstones,
  This will be in a king's bed then.
  
  Your eyes are wolves' eyes:
  So many, so many, so famishing
  I will undo it, handle me not yet, I can undo it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Or I will tear it.
  
  And when it is off me then I will be delivered to you beasts .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA
  Then strip her and use her to the bones, wear her through, kill
  her with it.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  When it is torn
  You'll say I am lovely: no one has seen before .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It won't tear: I'll slit it with this knife
  (Aegisthus, with many spearmen, issues from the great door.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA stabs right and left with the knife; the
  men are too close to strike her with their long spears.
  
  )
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  It's time.
  
  Cowards, goats, goats.
  
  Here! Aegisthus!
  Aegisthus
  I am here.
  
  What have they done?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Nothing: clear the porch: I have done something.
  
  Drive them
  on the stair!
  Three of them I've scarred for life: a rough bridegroom, the
  rabble, met a fierce bride.
  
  (She catches up her robe.
  
  )
  I held them with my eyes, hours, hours.
  
  I am not tired.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  My lord, my lover:
  I have killed a twelve-point stag for a present for you: with my
  own hands: look, on the golden litter.
  
  You arrive timely.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA
  Tricked, stabbed, shamed, mocked at, the spoil of a lewd woman,
  despised
  I lie there ready for her back-stairs darling to spit on.
  
  Tricked,
  stabbed, sunk in the drain
  And gutter of time.
  
  I that thundered the assault, I that mustered
  the Achaeans.
  
  Cast out of my kingdom,
  Cast out of time, out of the light.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   One of the captives, dear.
  
  It left its poor wits
  Over the sea.
  
  If it annoys you I'll quiet it.
  
  But post your sentinels.
  
  All's not safe yet, though I am burning with joy now.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA    O single-eyed
  glare of the sky
  Flying southwest to the mountain: sun, through a slave's eyes,
  My own broken, I see you this last day; my own darkened, no
  dawn forever; the adulterers
  Will swim in your warm gold, day after day; the eyes of the
  murderess will possess you;
  And I have gone away down: knowing that no God in the earth
  nor sky loves justice; and having tasted
  The toad that serves women for heart.
  
  From now on may all
  bridegrooms
  Marry them with swords.
  
  Those that have borne children
  Their sons rape them with spears.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   More yet, more, more, more,
  while my hand's in?
  
  It's not a little
  You easily living lords of the sky require of who'd be like you,
  who'd take time in the triumph,
  Build joy solid.
  
  Do we have to do everything?
  
  I have killed
  what I hated:
  Kill what I love?
  
  The prophetess said it, this dead man says it:
  my little son, the small soft image
  That squirmed in my arms be an avenger?
  
  Love, from your loins
  Seed: I begin new, I will be childless for you.
  
  The child my son,
  the child my daughter!
  Though I cry I feel nothing.
  
  AEGISTHUS   O strongest spirit in the world.
  
  We have dared enough, there is an end to it.
  
  We may pass nature a little, an arrow-flight,
  But two shots over the wall you come in a cloud upon the feasting
  Gods, lightning and madness.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Dear: make them safe.
  
  They may try to run away, the children.
  
  Set spears to watch them: no harm, no harm,
  But stab the nurse if they go near a door.
  
  Watch them, keep the
  gates, order the sentinels,
  While I make myself Queen over this people again.
  
  I can do it.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA   The sun's gone; that glimmer's
  The moon of the dead.
  
  The dark God calls me.
  
  Yes, God,
  I'll come in a moment.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (at the head of the great stairs)
  Soldiers: townsmen: it seems
  I am not at the end delivered to you: dogs, for the lion came:
  the poor brown and spotted women
  Will have to suffice you.
  
  But is it nothing to have come within
  handling distance of the clear heaven
  This dead man knew when he was young and God endured him?
  
  Is it nothing to you?
  
  It is something to me to have felt the fury
  And concentration of you: I will not say I am grateful: I am
  not angry: to be desired
  Is wine even to a queen.
  
  You bathed me in it, from brow to foot-sole,
  I had nearly enough.
  
  But now remember that the dream is over.
  
  I am the Queen:
  Mycenae is my city.
  
  If you grin at me
  I have spears: also Tiryns and all the country people of the
  Argolis will come against you and swallow you,
  Empty out these ways and walls, stock them with better subjects.
  
  A rock nest for new birds here, townsfolk:
  You are not essential.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA.
  
  I hear him calling through the shewolf's
  noise, Agamemnon, Agamemnon,
  The dark God calls.
  
  Some old king in a fable is it?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   So choose.
  
  What choices?
  
  To reenter my service
  Unpunished, no thought of things past, free of conditions .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Or dine at this man's table, have new mouths made in you to
  eat bronze with.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA   Who is Agamemnon?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  You letting go of the sun: is it dark the land you are running
  away to?
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA   It is dark.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   IS it Sorrowful?
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA
  There is nothing but misery.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Has any man ever come back thence?
  
  Hear me,  not the dark God.
  
  THE BODY OF CASSANDRA No man has ever.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Go then, go, go down.
  
  You will not choose to follow him, people
  of the rock-city?
  
  No one
  Will choose to follow him.
  
  I have killed: it is easy: it may be
  I shall kill nearer than this yet:
  But not you, townsfolk, you will give me no cause; I want
  security; I want service, not blood.
  
  I have been desired of the whole city, publicly; I want service,
  not lust.
  
  You will make no sign
  Of your submission; you will not give up your weapons; neither
  shall your leaders be slain;
  And he that flung the spear, I have forgotten his face.
  
  AEGISTHUS   (entering) Dearest,
  they have gone, the nurse and the children,
  No one knows where.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   I am taming this people: send men after
  them.
  
  If any harm comes to the children
  Bring me tokens.
  
  I will not be in doubt, I will not have the arch
  fall on us.
  
  I dare
  What no one dares.
  
  I envy a little the dirty mothers of the city.
  
  O, O!
  Nothing in me hurts.
  
  I have animal waters in my eyes, but the
  spirit is not wounded.
  
  Electra and Orestes
  Are not to live when they are caught.
  
  Bring me sure tokens.
  
  CASSANDRA   Who is this woman like a beacon
  Lit on the stair, who are these men with dogs' heads?
  
  I have ranged time and seen no sight like this one.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Have you returned, Cassandra?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  The dead king has gone
  down to his place, we may bury his leavings.
  
  CASSANDRA
  I have witnessed all the wars to be; I am not sorrowful
  For one drop from the pail of desolation
  Spilt on my father's city; they were carrying it forward
  To water the world under the latter starlight.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (to her slaves)
  Take up the poles of the bed; reverently; careful on the stair;
  give him to the people.
  
  (To the people) O soldiers
  This was your leader; lay him with honor in the burial-chapel;
  guard him with the spears of victory;
  Mourn him until to-morrow, when the pyre shall be built.
  
  Ah, King of men, sleep, sleep, sleep!
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  But when shall I?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  They are after their corpse, like
  dogs after the butcher's cart.
  
  Cleomenes, that captain
  With the big voice: Neobulus was the boy who flung the spear
  and missed.
  
  I shall not miss
  When spear-flinging-time comes.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Captive woman, you have
  seen the future, tell me my fortune.
  
  (Aegisthus comes from the doorway.
  
  )
  Aegisthus,
  Have your hounds got them?
  
  AEGISTHUS   I've covered every escape with men,
  they'll not slip through me.
  
  But commanded
  To bring them here living.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   That's hard: tigresses don't do it: I
  have some strength yet: don't speak of it
  And I shall do it.
  
  AEGISTHUS   It is a thing not to be done: we'll guard them
  closely: but mere madness
  Lies over the wall of too-much.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   King of Mycenae, new-crowned
  king, who was your mother?
  
  AEGISTHUS   Pelopia.
  
  What mark do you aim at?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   And your father?
  
  AEGISTHUS   Thyestes.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   And her father?
  
  AEGISTHUS   The
  same man, Thyestes.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  See, dearest, dearest?
  
  They love what men call crime, they have
  taken her crime to be the king of Mycenae.
  
  Here is the stone garden of the plants that pass nature: there is
  no too-much here: the monstrous
  Old rocks want monstrous roots to serpent among them.
  
  I will
  have security.
  
  I'd burn the standing world
  Up to this hour and begin new.
  
  You think I am too much used
  for a new brood?
  
  Ah, lover,
  I have fountains in me.
  
  I had a fondness for the brown cheek
  of that boy, the curl of his
  lip,
  The widening blue of the doomed eyes .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I will be spared
  nothing.
  
  Come in, come in, they'll have news for us.
  
  no
  CASSANDRA
  If anywhere in the world
  Were a tower with foundations, or a treasure-chamber
  With a firm vault, or a walled fortress
  That stood on the years, not staggering, not moving
  As the mortar were mixed with wine for water
  And poppy for lime: they reel, they are all drunkards,
  The piled strengths of the world: no pyramid
  In bitter Egypt in the desert
  But skips at moonrise; no mountain
  Over the Black Sea in awful Caucasus
  But whirls like a young kid, like a bud of the herd,
  Under the hundredth star: I am sick after steadfastness
  Watching the world cataractlike
  Pour screaming onto steep ruins: for the wings of prophecy
  God once my lover give me stone sandals
  Planted on stone: he hates me, the God, he will never
  Take home the gift of the bridleless horse
  The stallion, the unbitted stallion: the bed
  Naked to the sky on Mount Ida,
  The soft clear grass there,
  Be blackened forever, may vipers and Greeks
  In that glen breed
  Twisting together, where the God
  Come golden from the sun
  Gave me for a bride-gift prophecy and I took it for a treasure:
  I a fool, I a maiden,
  I would not let him touch me though love of him maddened me
  Till he fed me that poison, till he planted that fire in me,
  The girdle flew loose then.
  
  The Queen considered this rock, she gazed on the great stone
  blocks of Mycenae's acropolis;
  Monstrous they seemed to her, solid they appeared to her, safe
  rootage for monstrous deeds: Ah fierce one
  Who knows who laid them for a snare?
  
  What people in the
  world's dawn breathed on chill air and the vapor
  Of their breath seemed stone and has stood and you dream it is
  established?
  
  These also are a foam on the stream
  Of the falling of the world: there is nothing to lay hold on:
  No crime is a crime, the slaying of the King was a meeting of
  two bubbles on the lip of the cataract,
  One winked .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and the killing of your children would be
  nothing: I tell you for a marvel that the earth is a dancer,
  The grave dark earth is less quiet than a fool's fingers,
  That old one, spinning in the emptiness, blown by no wind in
  vain circles, light-witted and a dancer.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA (entering)
  You are prophesying: prophesy to a purpose, captive woman.
  
  My children, the boy and the girl,
  Have wandered astray, no one can find them.
  
  CASSANDRA   Shall I tell the lioness
  Where meat is, or the she-wolf where the lambs wander astray?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   But look into the darkness
  And foam of the world: the boy has great tender blue eyes,
  brown hair, disdainful lips, you'll know him
  By the gold stripe bordering his garments; the girl's eyes are
  my color, white her clothing
  CASSANDRA   Millions
  Of shining bubbles burst and wander
  On the stream of the world falling .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   These are my children!
  CASSANDRA   I see
  mountains, I see no faces.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Tell me and I make you free; conceal it from me and a soldier's
  spear finishes the matter.
  
  CASSANDRA
  I am the spear's bride, I have been waiting, waiting for that
  ecstasy
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (striking her) Live then.
  
  It will not be unpainful.
  
  (CLYTEMNESTRA goes in.
  
  )
  CASSANDRA
  O fair roads north where the land narrows
  Over the mountains between the great gulfs,
  that I too with the King's children
  Might wander northward hand in hand.
  
  Mine are worse wanderings:
  They will shelter on Mount Parnassus,
  For me there is no mountain firm enough,
  The storms of light beating on the headlands,
  The storms of music undermine the mountains, they stumble
  and fall inward,
  Such music the stars
  Make in their courses, the vast vibration
  Plucks the iron heart of the earth like a harp-string.
  
  Iron and stone core, O stubborn axle of the earth, you also
  Dissolving in a little time like salt in water,
  What does it matter that I have seen Macedon
  Roll all the Greek cities into one billow and strand in Asia
  The anthers and bracts of the flower of the world?
  
  That I have seen Egypt and Nineveh
  Crumble, and a Latian village
  Plant the earth with javelins?
  
  It made laws for all men, it dissolved
  like a cloud.
  
  I have also stood watching a storm of wild swans
  Rise from one river-mouth .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  O force of the earth rising,
  O fallings of the earth: forever no rest, not forever
  From the wave and the trough, from the stream and the slack,
  from growth and decay: O vulture-
  Pinioned, my spirit, one flight yet, last, longest, unguided,
  Try into the gulf,
  Over Greece, over Rome, you have space O my spirit for the
  years
  II
  Are not few of captivity: how many have I stood here
  Among the great stones, while the Queen's people
  Go in and out of the gate, wearing light linen
  For summer and the wet spoils of wild beasts
  In the season of storms: and the stars have changed, I have
  watched
  The grievous and unprayed-to constellations
  Pile steaming spring and patient autumn
  Over the enduring walls: but you over the walls of the world,
  Over the unquieted centuries, over the darkness-hearted
  Millenniums wailing thinly to be born, O vulture-pinioned
  Try into the dark,
  Watch the north spawn white bodies and red-gold hair,
  Race after race of beastlike warriors; and the cities
  Burn, and the cities build, and new lands be uncovered
  In the way of the sun to his setting .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  go on farther, what
  profit
  In the wars and the toils?
  
  but I say
  Where are prosperous people my enemies are, as you pass them
  O my spirit
  Curse Athens for the joy and the marble, curse Corinth
  For the wine and the purple, and Syracuse
  For the gold and the ships; but Rome, Rome,
  With many destructions for the corn and the laws and the javelins,
  the insolence, the threefold
  Abominable power: pass the humble
  And the lordships of darkness, but far down
  Smite Spain for the blood on the sunset gold, curse France
  For the fields abounding and the running rivers, the lights in the
  cities, the laughter, curse England
  For the meat on the tables and the terrible gray ships, for old
  laws, far dominions, there remains
  A mightier to be cursed and a higher for malediction
  When America has eaten Europe and takes tribute of Asia, when
  the ends of the world grow aware of each other
  And are dogs in one kennel, they will tear
  The master of the hunt with the mouths of the pack: new fallings,
  new risings, O winged one
  No end of the fallings and risings?
  
  An end shall be surely,
  Though unnatural things are accomplished, they breathe in the
  sea's depth,
  They swim in the air, they bridle the cloud-leaper lightning to
  carry their messages:
  Though the eagles of the east and the west and the falcons of
  the north were not quieted, you have seen a white cloth
  Cover the lands from the north and the eyes of the lands and the
  claws of the hunters,
  The mouths of the hungry with snow
  Were filled, and their claws
  Took hold upon ice in the pasture, a morsel of ice was their
  catch in the rivers,
  That pure white quietness
  Waits on the heads of the mountains, not sleep but death, will
  the fire
  Of burnt cities and ships in that year warm you my enemies?
  
  The frost, the old frost,
  Like a cat with a broken-winged bird it will play with you,
  It will nip and let go; you will say it is gone, but the next
  Season it increases: O clean, clean,
  White and most clean, colorless quietness,
  Without trace, without trail, without stain in the garment, drawn
  down
  From the poles to the girdle.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I have known one Godhead
  To my sore hurt: I am growing to come to another: O grave
  and kindly
  Last of the lords of the earth, I pray you lead my substance
  Speedily into another shape, make me grass, Death, make me
  stone,
  Make me air to wander free between the stars and the peaks;
  but cut humanity
  Out of my being, that is the wound that festers in me,
  Not captivity, not my enemies: you will heal the earth also,
  Death, in your time; but speedily Cassandra.
  
  You rock-fleas hopping in the clefts of Mycenae,
  Suckers of blood, you carrying the scepter farther, Persian,
  Emathian,
  Roman and Mongol and American, and you half-gods
  Indian and Syrian and the third, emperors of peace, I have seen
  on what stage
  You sing the little tragedy; the column of the ice that was before
  on one side flanks it,
  The column of the ice to come closes it up on the other: audience
  nor author
  I have never seen yet: I have heard the silence: it is I Cassandra,
  Eight years the bitter watchdog of these doors,
  Have watched a vision
  And now approach to my end.
  
  Eight years I have seen the
  phantoms
  Walk up and down this stair; and the rocks groan in the night,
  the great stones move when no man sees them.
  
  And I have forgotten the fine ashlar masonry of the courts of my
  father.
  
  I am not Cassandra
  But a counter of sunrises, permitted to live because I am crying
  to die; three thousand,
  Pale and red, have flowed over the towers in the wall since I was
  here watching; the deep east widens,
  The cold wind blows, the deep earth sighs, the dim gray finger
  of light crooks at the morning star.
  
  The palace feasted late and sleeps with its locked doors; the last
  drunkard from the alleys of the city
  Long has reeled home.
  
  Whose foot is this then, what phantom
  Toils on the stair?
  
  A VOICE BELOW   Is someone watching above?
  
  Good sentinel I
  am only a girl beggar.
  
  I would sit on the stair and hold my bowl.
  
  CASSANDRA   I here eight years have
  begged for a thing and not received it.
  
  THE VOICE
  You are not a sentinel?
  
  You have been asking some great boon,
  out of all reason.
  
  CASSANDRA   No: what the meanest
  Beggar disdains to take.
  
  THE GIRL BEGGAR   Beggars disdain nothing: what is it that
  they refuse you?
  
  CASSANDRA   What's given
  Even to the sheep and to the bullock.
  
  THE GIRL   Men give them salt, grass
  they find out for themselves.
  
  CASSANDRA   Men give them
  The gift that you though a beggar have brought down from the
  north to give my mistress.
  
  THE GIRL   You speak riddles.
  
  I am starving, a crust is my desire.
  
  CASSANDRA   Your voice is young though
  winds have hoarsened it, your body appears
  Flexible under the rags: have you some hidden sickness, the
  young men will not give you silver?
  
  THE GIRL
  I have a sickness: I will hide it until I am cured.
  
  You are not
  a Greek woman?
  
  CASSANDRA   But you
  Born in Mycenae return home.
  
  And you bring gifts from Phocis:
  for my once master who's dead
  Vengeance; and for my mistress peace, for my master the King
  peace, and, by-shot of the doom's day,
  Peace for me also.
  
  But I have prayed for it.
  
  THE GIRL   I know you, I knew
  you before you spoke to me, captive woman,
  And I unarmed will kill you with my hands if you babble
  prophecies.
  
  That peace you have prayed for, I will bring it to you
  If you utter warnings.
  
  CASSANDRA   To-day I shall have peace, you cannot
  tempt me, daughter of the Queen, Electra.
  
  Eight years ago I watched you and your brother going north
  to Phocis: the Queen saw knowledge of you
  Move in my eyes: I would not tell her where you were when
  she commanded me: I will not betray you
  To-day either: it is not doleful to me
  To see before I die generations of destruction enter the doors
  of Agamemnon.
  
  Where is your brother?
  
  ELECTRA   Prophetess: you see all: I will tell you
  nothing.
  
  CASSANDRA   He has well chosen his ambush,
  It is true Aegisthus passes under that house to-day, to hunt in
  the mountain.
  
  ELECTRA   Now I remember
  Your name.
  
  Cassandra.
  
  CASSANDRA   Hush: the gray has turned yellow, the
  standing beacons
  Stream up from the east; they stir there in the palace; strange,
  is it not, the dawn of one's last day's
  Like all the others?
  
  Your brother would be fortunate if to-day
  were also
  The last of his.
  
  ELECTRA   He will endure his destinies; and Cassandra hers;
  and Electra mine.
  
  He has been for years like one tortured with fire: this day will
  quench it.
  
  CASSANDRA   They are opening the gates: beg now.
  
  To your trade, beggar-woman.
  
  THE PORTER (coming out) Eh, pillar of miseries,
  You still on guard there?
  
  Like a mare in a tight stall, never lying
  down.
  
  What's this then?
  
  A second ragged one?
  
  This at least can bend in the middle and
  sit on a stone.
  
  ELECTRA   Dear gentleman
  I am not used to it, my father is dead and hunger forces me to
  beg, a crust or a penny.
  
  THE PORTER
  This tall one's licensed in a manner.
  
  I think they'll not let two
  bundles of rag
  Camp on the stair: but if you'd come to the back door and please
  me nicely: with a little washing
  It'd do for pastime.
  
  ELECTRA   I was reared gently: I will sit here, the King
  will see me,
  And none mishandle me.
  
  THE PORTER I bear no blame for you.
  
  I have not seen you: you came after the gates were opened.
  
  (He goes in.
  
  )
  CASSANDRA
  O blossom of fire, bitter to men,
  Watchdog of the woeful days,
  How many sleepers
  Bathing in peace, dreaming themselves delight,
  All over the city, all over the Argolid plain, all over the dark
  earth,
  (Not me, a deeper draught of peace
  And darker waters alone may wash me)
  Do you, terrible star, star without pity,
  Wolf of the east, waken to misery.
  
  To the wants unaccomplished, to the eating desires,
  To unanswered love, to hunger, to the hard edges
  And mold of reality, to the whips of their masters.
  
  They had flown away home to the happy darkness,
  They were safe until sunrise.
  
  (King Aegisthus, with his retinue, comes from the great
  door.
  
  )
  AEGISTHUS
  Even here, in the midst of the city, the early day
  Has a clear savor.
  
  (To ELECTRA) What, are you miserable, holding
  the bowl out?
  
  We'll hear the lark to-day in the wide hills and smell the mountain.
  
  I'd share happiness with you.
  
  What's your best wish, girl beggar?
  
  ELECTRA   It is covered, my lord, how
  should a beggar
  Know what to wish for beyond a crust and a dark corner and a
  little kindness?
  
  AEGISTHUS   Why do you tremble?
  
  ELECTRA
  I was reared gently; my father is dead.
  
  AEGISTHUS   Stand up: will you take
  service here in the house?
  
  What country
  Bred you gently and proved ungentle to you?
  
  ELECTRA   I have wandered
  north from the Eurotas, my lord,
  Begging at farmsteads.
  
  AEGISTHUS   The Queen's countrywoman then, she'll
  use you kindly.
  
  She'll be coming
  In a moment, then I'll speak for you.
  
  -Did you bid them yoke
  the roans into my chariot, Menalcas,
  The two from Orchomenus?
  
  ONE OF THE RETINUE   Yesterday evening, my lord,
  I sent to the stable.
  
  AEGISTHUS   They cost a pretty penny, we'll see how they
  carry it.
  
  She's coming: hold up your head, girl.
  
  (CLYTEMNESTRA, with two serving-women, comes from
  the door.
  
  )
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Good hunt, dearest.
  
  Here's a long idle day for me to look to.
  
  Kill early, come home early.
  
  AEGISTHUS
  There's a poor creature on the step who's been reared nicely
  and slipped into misery.
  
  I said you'd feed her,
  And maybe find her a service.
  
  Farewell, sweet one.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Where did she come from?
  
  How long have you
  been here?
  
  AEGISTHUS   She says she has begged her way up from Sparta.
  
  The horses are stamping on the cobbles, good-by, good-by.
  
  (He goes down the stair with his huntsmen.
  
  )
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Good-by, dearest.
  
  Well.
  
  Let me see your face.
  
  ELECTRA It is filthy to look at.
  
  I am ashamed.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (to one of her serving-women) Leucippe do
  you think this is a gayety of my lord's, he's not used to be
  so kindly to beggars?
  
  -Let me see your face.
  
  LEUCIPPE   She is very dirty, my lady.
  
  It is possible one of the
  house-boys .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   I say draw that rag back, let me see your face.
  
  I'd have him whipped then.
  
  ELECTRA   It was only in hope that someone would put a crust
  in the bowl, your majesty, for I am starving.
  
  I didn't think
  your majesty would see me.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Draw back the rag.
  
  ELECTRA   I am very faint and starving but I will go down; I am
  ashamed.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Stop her, Corinna.
  
  Fetch the porter, Leucippe.
  
  You will not go so easily.
  
  (ELECTRA sinks down on the steps
  and lies prone, her head covered.
  
  ) I am aging out of queenship
  indeed, when even the beggars refuse my bidding.
  
  (LEUCIPPE comes in 'with the porter.
  
  ) You have a dirty stair,
  porter.
  
  How long has this been here?
  
  THE PORTER   O my lady it has crept up since I opened the doors,
  it was not here when I opened the doors.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Lift it up and uncover its face.
  
  What is that
  cry in the city?
  
  Stop: silent: I heard a cry .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Prophetess, your nostrils move like a dog's, what is that shouting?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I have grown weak, I am exhausted, things frighten me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Tell her to be gone, Leucippe, I don't wish to see her, I don't
  wish to see her.
  
  (ELECTRA rises.
  
  )
  ELECTRA   Ah, Queen, I will show you my face.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   No .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  no .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  be gone.
  
  ELECTRA   (uncovering her face)
  Mother: I have come home: I am humbled.
  
  This house keeps
  a dark welcome
  For those coming home out of far countries.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   I Won't look: how
  could I know anyone?
  
  I am old and shaking.
  
  He said, Over the wall beyond nature
  Lightning, and the laughter of the Gods.
  
  I did not cross it,
  I will not kill what I gave life to.
  
  Whoever you are, go, go, let me grow downward to the grave
  quietly now.
  
  ELECTRA    I cannot
  Go: I have no other refuge.
  
  Mother! Will you not kiss me, will
  you not take me into the house,
  Your child once, long a wanderer?
  
  Electra my name.
  
  I have
  begged my way from Phocis, my brother is dead there,
  Who used to care for me.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Who is dead, who?
  
  ELECTRA   My brother Orestes,
  Killed in a court quarrel
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (weeping) Oh, you lie! The widening blue
  blue eyes,
  The little voice of the child .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Liar.
  
  ELECTRA   It is true.
  
  I have wept
  long, on every mountain.
  
  You, mother,
  Have only begun weeping.
  
  Far off, in a far country, no fit
  burial .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   And do you bringing
  Bitterness .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  or lies .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  look for a welcome?
  
  I have only
  loved two:
  The priest
  killed my daughter for a lamb on a stone and now
  you say the boy too .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  dead, dead?
  
  The world's full of it, a shoreless lake of lies and floating rumors
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  pack up your wares, peddler,
  Too false for a queen.
  
  Why, no, if I believed you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Beast,
  treacherous beast, that shouting comes nearer,
  What's in the city?
  
  ELECTRA   I am a stranger, I know nothing of the city,
  I know only
  My mother hates me, and Orestes my brother
  Died pitifully, far off.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Too many things, too many things call
  me, what shall I do?
  
  Electra,
  Electra help me.
  
  This comes of living softly, I had a lion's
  strength
  Once.
  
  ELECTRA   Me for help?
  
  I am utterly helpless, I had help in my
  brother and he is dead in Phocis.
  
  Give me refuge: but each of us two must weep for herself, one
  sorrow.
  
  An end of the world were on us
  What would it matter to us weeping?
  
  Do you remember him,
  Mother, mother?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   I have dared too much: never dare anything,
  Electra, the ache is afterward,
  At the hour it hurts nothing.
  
  Prophetess, you lied.
  
  You said he would come with vengeance on me: but now he is
  dead, this girl says: and because he was lovely, blue-eyed,
  And born in a most unhappy house I will believe it.
  
  But the
  world's fogged with the breath of liars,
  And if she has laid a net for me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I'll call up the old lioness lives yet in my body, I have dared,
  I have dared, and tooth and talon
  Carve a way through.
  
  Lie to me?
  
  ELECTRA   Have I endured for months,
  with feet bleeding, among the mountains,
  Between the great gulfs alone and starving, to bring you a lie
  now?
  
  I know the worst of you, I looked for the worst,
  Mother, mother, and have expected nothing but to die of this
  home-coming: but Orestes
  Has entered the cave before; he is gathered up in a lonely mountain
  quietness, he is guarded from angers
  In the tough cloud that spears fall back from.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Was he still beautiful?
  
  The brown mothers down in the city
  Keep their brats about them; what it is to live high! Oh!
  Tell them down there, tell them in Tiryns,
  Tell them in Sparta,
  That water drips through the Queen's fingers and trickles down
  her wrists, for the boy, for the boy
  Born of her body, whom she, fool, fool, fool,
  Drove out of the world.
  
  Electra,
  Make peace with me.
  
  Oh, Oh, Oh!
  I have labored violently all the days of my life for nothing--
  nothing-worse than anything- this death
  Was a thing I wished.
  
  See how they make fools of us.
  
  Amusement for them, to watch us labor after the thing that will
  tear us in
  pieces.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Well, strength's good.
  
  I am the Queen; I will gather up my fragments
  And not go mad now.
  
  ELECTRA   Mother, what are the men
  With spears gathering at the stair's foot?
  
  Not of Mycenae by
  their armor, have you mercenaries
  Wanting pay?
  
  Do they serve .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Aegisthus?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   What men?
  
  I seem
  not to know .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Who has laid a net for me, what fool
  For me, me?
  
  Porter, by me.
  
  Leucippe, my guards; into the house, rouse them.
  
  I am sorry
  for him,
  I am best in storm.
  
  You, Electra?
  
  The death you'll die, my daughter.
  
  Guards, out! Was it a lie?
  
  No matter, no matter, no matter,
  Here's peace.
  
  Spears, out, out! They bungled the job making
  me a woman.
  
  Here's youth come back to me,
  And all the days of gladness.
  
  LEUCIPPE   (running back from the door) O, Queen, strangers .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ORESTES   (a sword in his hand, 'with spearmen following, comes
  from the door) Where is that woman
  The Gods utterly hate?
  
  ELECTRA   Brother: let her not speak, kill quickly.
  
  Is the other one safe now?
  
  ORESTES That dog
  Fell under his chariot, we made sure of him between the wheels
  and the hooves, squealing.
  
  Now for this one.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  Wait.
  
  I was weeping, Electra will tell you, my hands are wet
  still,
  For your blue eyes that death had closed she said away up in
  Phocis.
  
  I die now, justly or not
  Is out of the story, before I die I'd tell you wait, child, wait.
  
  Did I quiver
  Or pale at the blade?
  
  I say, caught in a net, netted in by my
  enemies, my husband murdered,
  Myself to die, I am joyful knowing she lied, you live, the only
  creature
  Under all the spread and arch of daylight
  That I love, lives.
  
  ELECTRA   The great fangs drawn fear craftiness now,
  kill quickly.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   As for her, the wife of a shepherd
  Suckled her, but you
  These very breasts nourished: rather one of your northern
  spearmen do what's needful; not you
  Draw blood where you drew milk.
  
  The Gods endure much, but
  beware them.
  
  ORESTES   This, a God in his temple
  Openly commanded.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Ah, child, child, who has mistaught you and
  who has betrayed you?
  
  What voice had the God?
  
  How was it different from a man's and did you see him?
  
  Who
  sent the priest presents?
  
  They fool us,
  And the Gods let them.
  
  No doubt also the envious King of
  Phocis has lent you counsel as he lent you
  Men: let one of them do it.
  
  Life's not jewel enough
  That I should plead for it: this much I pray, for your sake, not
  with your hand, not with your hand, or the memory
  Will so mother you, so glue to you, so embracing you,
  Not the deep sea's green day, no cleft of a rock in the bed of
  the deep sea, no ocean of darkness
  Outside the stars, will hide nor wash you.
  
  What is it to me that
  I have rejoiced knowing you alive,
  child, O precious to me, O alone loved, if now dying by my
  manner of death
  I make nightmare the heir, nightmare, horror, in all I have of
  you;
  And you haunted forever, never to sleep dreamless again, never
  to see blue cloth
  But the red runs over it; fugitive of dreams, madman at length,
  the memory of a scream following you houndlike,
  Inherit Mycenae?
  
  Child, for this has not been done before, there
  is no old fable, no whisper
  Out of the foundation, among the people that were before our
  people, no echo has ever
  Moved among these most ancient stones, the monsters here, nor
  stirred under any mountain, nor fluttered
  Under any sky, of a man slaying his mother.
  
  Sons have killed
  fathers
  ORESTES   And a woman her son's father
  CLYTEMNESTRA
  O many times: and these old stones have seen horrors: a house
  of madness and blood
  I married into: and worse was done on this rock among the older
  people before: but not this,
  Not the son his mother; this the silent ones,
  The old hard ones, the great bearers of burden have not seen yet,
  Nor shall, to-day nor yet to-morrow, nor ever in the world.
  
  Let her do it, it is not unnatural,
  The daughter the mother; the little liar there,
  Electra do it.
  
  Lend her the blade.
  
  ELECTRA   Brother though the great house
  is silent hark the city,
  That buzzes like the hive one has dipped a wand in.
  
  End this.
  
  Then look to our safety.
  
  ORESTES   Dip in my sword
  Into my fountain?
  
  Did I truly, little and helpless,
  Lie in the arms, feed on the breast there?
  
  ELECTRA   Another, a greater, lay
  in them, another kissed the breast there,
  You forget easily, the breaker of Asia, the over-shadower, the
  great memory, under whose greatness
  We have hung like hawks under a storm, from the beginning,
  and he when this poison destroyed him
  Was given no room to plead in.
  
  ORESTES   Dip my wand into my fountain?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   Men do not kill the meanest
  Without defence heard
  ELECTRA   Him-Agamemnon?
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA But you, O my son, my son,
  Moulded in me, made of me, made of my flesh, built with my
  blood, fed with my milk, my child
  I here, I and no other, labored to bear, groaning-
  ELECTRA   This that
  makes beastlike lamentation
  Hunted us to slay us, we starving in the thicket above the stream
  three days and nights watched always
  Her hunters with spears beating the field: prophetess was it for
  love that she looked after us?
  
  CASSANDRA   That love
  The King had tasted; that was her love.
  
  ELECTRA   And mourning for our
  father on the mountain we judged her;
  And the God condemned her, what more, what more?
  
  Strike.
  
  ORESTES   If they'd give me time, the pack there how can I
  think,
  And all the whelps of Mycenae yelling at the stair-foot?
  
  Decision:
  a thing to be decided:
  The arm's lame, dip in, dip in?
  
  Shut your mouths, rabble.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   There is one thing no man can do.
  
  ORESTES   What, enter
  his fountain?
  
  ELECTRA
  O coward!
  ORESTES   I will be passive, I'm blunted.
  
  She's not this fellow's
  mother.
  
  ELECTRA   O spearman, spearman, do it!
  One stroke: it is just.
  
  THE SPEARMAN   As for me, my lord .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (calling loudly) Help, help, men
  of Mycenae, to your Queen.
  
  Break them.
  
  Rush the stair, there are only ten hold it.
  
  Up, up, kill.
  
  ORESTES   I will kill.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (falling on her knees) Child,
  Spare me, let me live! Child! Ai! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ELECTRA   You have done well.
  
  ORESTES   I have done .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I have done .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Who ever saw such a flow .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  was I made out of this, I'm not
  red, am I?
  
  See, father?
  
  It was someone else did it but I told him to.
  
  Drink, drink, dog.
  
  Drink dog.
  
  He reaches up a tongue between the stones, lapping it.
  
  So thirsty
  old dog, uh?
  
  Rich and sticky.
  
  CLYTEMNESTRA   (raising herself a little) Sleep .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  for me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  yes.
  
  Not you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  any more .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Orestes .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I shall be there.
  
  You
  will beg death .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  vainly as I have begged .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  life.
  
  Ah
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  beast that I unkennelled! (She dies.
  
  )
  ORESTES   (crouching by her) Ooh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ooh .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ELECTRA
  The face is lean and terrible.
  
  Orestes!
  They are fighting on the stair.
  
  Man yourself.
  
  Come.
  
  Pick up the
  sword.
  
  Let her be, two of ours are down, they yield on the stair.
  
  Stand
  up, speak or fight, speak to the people
  Or we go where she is.
  
  ORESTES   There's a red and sticky sky that you
  can touch here.
  
  And though it's unpleasant we are at peace.
  
  ELECTRA   (catching up the sword) Agamemnon failed
  here.
  
  Not in me.
  
  Hear, Mycenaeans.
  
  I am Agamemnon's daughter, we have avenged him, the crime's
  paid utterly.
  
  You have not forgotten the great King what, in eight years?
  
  I am Electra, I am his daughter.
  
  My brother is Orestes.
  
  My brother is your King and has killed
  his murderers.
  
  The dog Aegisthus is dead,
  And the Queen is dead: the city is at peace.
  
  ORESTES   (standing up) Must I dip my wand
  into my fountain, give it to me.
  
  The male plaything.
  
  (He catches ELECTRA'S army snatching at
  the sword.
  
  )
  ELECTRA   For what?
  
  Be quiet, they have heard me.
  
  ORESTES   You said I must do it, I will do it.
  
  ELECTRA   It is done!
  Brother, brother?
  
  (ORESTES takes the sword from her by force.
  
  )
  O Mycenae
  With this sword he did justice, he let it fall, he has retaken it,
  He is your King.
  
  ORESTES   Whom must I pierce, the girl that plotted with
  me in the mountain?
  
  There was someone to kill .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Sweet Electra?
  
  ELECTRA   It is done, it is finished!
  CASSANDRA   The nearest, the most
  loved, her, truly.
  
  Strike! Electra,
  My father has wanted vengeance longer.
  
  THE PEOPLE BELOW   Orestes, Orestes!
  ELECTRA   (pointing to CASSANDRA) Her
  your mother she killed him.
  
  ORESTES   (turning and striking) How tall you have grown,
  mother.
  
  CASSANDRA   (falling) I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  waited long for it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ORESTES
  I have killed my mother and my mother-two mothers-see,
  there they lie-I have gone home twice.
  
  You put it in
  And the flesh yields to it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  (He goes down the stair.
  
  ) Now,
  to find her again
  All through the forest .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ELECTRA   Let him pass, Mycenaeans.
  
  Avoid his
  sword.
  
  Let him pass, pass.
  
  The madness of the house
  Perches on him.
  
  A LEADER OF THE MYCENAEANS   Daughter of Agamemnon,
  You with constancy and force
  In the issueless thing have found an issue.
  
  Now it is for us the
  kingless city
  To find a ruler.
  
  Rest in the house.
  
  As for the young man,
  Though he has done justice, and no hand in Mycenae is raised
  against him, for him there is no issue.
  
  We let him go on; and if he does not slay himself with the red
  sword he will die in the mountain.
  
  With us be peace.
  
  Rest in the house, daughter of Agamemnon.
  
  The old madness, with your brother,
  Go out of our gates.
  
  ELECTRA    A house to rest in! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Gather up the
  dead: I will go in; I have learned strength.
  
  III
  They carried the dead down the great stair; the slaves with pails
  of water and sand scoured the dark stains.
  
  The people meeting in another place to settle the troubled city
  the stair was left vacant,
  The porch untrampled, and about twilight one of the great
  stones: the world is younger than we are,
  Yet now drawing to an end, now that the seasons falter.
  
  Then
  another, that had been spared the blood-bath:
  What way do they falter?
  
  There fell warm rain, the first answered,
  in the midst of summer.
  
  A little afterward
  Cold rain came down; and sand was rubbed over me as when the
  winds blow.
  
  This in the midst of summer.
  
  I did not feel it, said the second sleepily.
  
  And a third: The
  noisy and very mobile creatures
  Will be quieted long before the world's end.
  
  What creatures?
  
  The active ones, that have two ends let downward,
  A mongrel race, mixed of soft stone with fugitive water.
  
  The
  night deepened, the dull old stones
  Droned at each other, the summer stars wheeled over above them.
  
  Before dawn the son of Agamemnon
  Came to the stair-foot in the darkness.
  
  ORESTES    O stones of the house:
  I entreat hardness: I did not live with you
  Long enough in my youth.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I will go up to where I killed
  her.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  We must face things down, mother,
  Or they'd devour us.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Nobody?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Even the stones have
  been scrubbed.
  
  A keen housekeeper, sweet Electra.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It would be childish to forget it; the woman has certainly
  been killed, and I think it was I
  Her son did it.
  
  Something not done before in the world.
  
  Here is
  the penalty:
  You gather up all your forces to the act, and afterward
  Silence, no voice, no ghost, vacancy, but all's not expended.
  
  Those powers want bitter action.
  
  No object.
  
  Deeds are too easy.
  
  Our victims are too fragile, they ought to have
  thousands of lives, you strike out once only
  The sky breaks like a bubble.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  No, wife of Aegisthus, why
  should I mask it?
  
  mother, my mother,
  The one soft fiber that went mad yesterday's
  Burnt out of me now, there is nothing you could touch if you
  should come; but you have no power, you dead
  Are a weak people.
  
  This is the very spot: I was here, she here:
  and I walk over it not trembling,
  Over the scrubbed stones to the door.
  
  (He knocks with the
  sword-hilt.
  
  ) They sleep well.
  
  But my sister having all her
  desire
  Better than any.
  
  (He knocks again.
  
  )
  THE PORTER   (through the door) Who is there?
  
  ORESTES   The owner of the house.
  
  Orestes.
  
  THE PORTER   Go away, drunkard.
  
  ORESTES   Shall I tell my servants to break in the door and whip
  the porter?
  
  THE PORTER   Oh, Oh! You men from Phocis, stand by me while
  I speak to the door.
  
  (Having opened the door, holding a
  torch.
  
  ) Is it you truly, my lord?
  
  We thought, we thought
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  we pray you to enter the house, my lord Orestes.
  
  ORESTES   You are to waken my sister.
  
  I'll speak with her here.
  
  ELECTRA   (at the door) Oh! You are safe, you are well! Did you
  think I could be sleeping?
  
  But it is true,
  I have slept soundly.
  
  Come, come.
  
  ORESTES   A fellow in the forest
  Told me you'd had the stone scrubbed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I mean, that you'd
  entered the house, received as Agamemnon's daughter
  In the honor of the city.
  
  So I free to go traveling have come with
  what's the word, Electra?
  
  farewell.
  
  Have come to bid you farewell.
  
  ELECTRA   It means you are going somewhere?
  
  Come into the house, Orestes, tell me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ORESTES
  The cape's rounded.
  
  I have not shipwrecked.
  
  ELECTRA   Around the rock
  we have passed safely is the hall of this house,
  The throne in the hall, the shining lordship of Mycenae.
  
  ORESTES   No:
  the open world, the sea and its wonders.
  
  You thought the oars raked the headland in the great storm
  what, for Mycenae?
  
  ELECTRA   Not meanest of the Greek cities:
  Whose king captained the world into Asia.
  
  Have you suddenly
  become .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  a God, brother, to over-vault
  Agamemnon's royalty?
  
  O come in, come in.
  
  I am cold, cold.
  
  I pray you.
  
  ORESTES   Fetch a cloak, porter.
  
  If I have outgrown the city a littleI have earned it.
  
  Did you
  notice, Electra, she caught at the sword
  As the point entered: the palm of her right hand was slashed to
  the bone before the mercy of the point
  Slept in her breast: the laid-open palm it was that undermined
  me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh, the cloak.
  
  It's a blond night,
  Well walk on the stones: no chill, the stars are mellow.
  
  If I dare
  remember
  Yesterday .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  because I have conquered, the soft fiber's burnt
  out.
  
  ELECTRA   You have conquered: possess: enter the house,
  Take up the royalty.
  
  ORESTES   You were in my vision to-night in the
  forest, Electra, I thought I embraced you
  More than brotherwise .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  possessed, you call it .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  entered
  the fountain
  ELECTRA   Oh, hush.
  
  Therefore you would not kill her!
  ORESTES
  I killed.
  
  It is foolish to darken things with words.
  
  I was here, she
  there, screaming.
  
  Who if not I?
  
  ELECTRA
  The hidden reason: the bitter kernel of your mind that has made
  you mad: I that learned strength
  Yesterday, I have no fear.
  
  ORESTES   Fear?
  
  The city is friendly and took
  you home with honor, they'll pay
  Phocis his wage, you will be quiet.
  
  ELECTRA   Are you resolved to understand
  nothing, Orestes?
  
  I am not Agamemnon, only his daughter.
  
  You are Agamemnon.
  
  Beggars and the sons of beggars
  May wander at will over the world, but Agamemnon has his
  honor and high Mycenae
  Is not to be cast.
  
  ORESTES   Mycenae for a ship: who will buy kingdom
  And sell me a ship with oars?
  
  ELECTRA   Dear: listen.
  
  Come to the parapet
  where it hangs over the night:
  The ears at the door hinder me.
  
  Now, let the arrow-eyed stars
  hear, the night, not men, as for the Gods
  No one can know them, whether they be angry or pleased, tall
  and terrible, standing apart,
  When they make signs out of the darkness.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I cannot tell you.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You will stay here, brother?
  
  ORESTES   I'll go
  To the edge and over it.
  
  Sweet sister, if you've got a message for
  them, the dark ones?
  
  ELECTRA   You do not mean
  Death; but a wandering; what does it matter what you mean?
  
  I know two ways and one will quiet you.
  
  You shall choose either.
  
  ORESTES   But I am quiet.
  
  It is more regular than
  a sleeping child's: be untroubled,
  Yours burns, it is you trembling.
  
  ELECTRA   Should I not tremble?
  
  It is only
  a little to offer,
  But all that I have.
  
  ORESTES   Offer?
  
  ELECTRA   It is accomplished: my father is
  avenged: the fates and the body of Electra
  Are nothing.
  
  But for Agamemnon to rule in Mycenae: that is not
  nothing.
  
  O my brother
  You are Agamemnon: rule: take all you will: nothing is denied
  you.
  
  The Gods have redressed evil
  And clamped the balance.
  
  ORESTES   No doubt they have done what they desired.
  
  ELECTRA   And yours,
  yours?
  
  I will not suffer her
  Justly punished to dog you over the end of the world.
  
  Your desire?
  
  Speak it openly, Orestes.
  
  She is to be conquered: if her ghost were present on the stones
  let it hear you.
  
  I will make war on her
  With my life, or with my body.
  
  ORESTES   What strange martyrdom, Electra,
  what madness for sacrifice
  Makes your eyes burn like two fires on a watch-tower, though
  the night darkens?
  
  ELECTRA   What you want you shall have:
  And rule in Mycenae.
  
  Nothing, nothing is denied you.
  
  If I knew
  which of the two choices
  Would quiet you, I would do and not speak, not ask you.
  
  Tell
  me, tell me.
  
  Must I bear all the burden,
  I weaker, and a woman?
  
  You and I were two hawks quartering
  the field for living flesh Orestes
  Under the storm of the memory
  Of Agamemnon: we struck: we tore the prey, that dog and that
  woman.
  
  Suddenly since yesterday
  You have shot up over me and left me,
  You are Agamemnon, you are the storm of the living presence,
  the very King, and I, lost wings
  Under the storm, would die for you.
  
  .
  
  , .
  
  You do not speak yet?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Mine to say it all?
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You know me a maiden, Orestes,
  You have always been with me, no man has even touched my
  cheek.
  
  It is not easy for one unmarried
  And chaste, to name both choices.
  
  The first is easy.
  
  That terrible
  dream in the forest: if fear of desire
  Drives you away: it is easy for me not to be.
  
  I never have known
  Sweetness in life: all my young days were given
  ORESTES   I thought to
  be silent was better,
  And understand you: afterwards I'll speak.
  
  ELECTRA   to the noise of
  blood crying for blood, a crime to be punished,
  A house to be emptied: these things are done: and now I am
  lonely, and what becomes of me is not important.
  
  There's water, and there are points and edges, pain's only a
  moment: I'd do it and not speak, but nobody knows
  Whether it would give you peace or madden you again, I'd not
  be leagued with that bad woman against you,
  And these great walls sit by the crater, terrible desires blow
  through them.
  
  O brother I'll never blame you,
  I share the motherhood and the fatherhood, I can conceive the
  madness, if you desire too near
  The fountain: tell me: I also love you: not that way, but enough
  to suffer.
  
  What needs to be done
  To make peace for you, tell me.
  
  I shall so gladly die to make it
  for you: or so gladly yield you
  What you know is maiden.
  
  You are the King; have all your will:
  only remain in steep Mycenae,
  In the honor of our father.
  
  Not yet: do not speak yet.
  
  You have
  said it is not
  Remorse drives you away: monsters require monsters, to have
  let her live a moment longer
  Would have been the crime: therefore it cannot be but desire
  drives you: or the fear of desire: dearest,
  It is known horror unlocks the heart, a shower of things hidden:
  if that which happened yesterday unmasked
  A beautiful brother's love and showed more awful eyes in it: all
  that our Gods require is courage.
  
  Let me see the face, let the eyes pierce me.
  
  What, dearest?
  
  Here
  in the stiff cloth of the sacred darkness
  Fold over fold hidden, above the sleeping city,
  By the great stones of the door, under the little golden falcons
  that swarm before dawn up yonder,
  In the silence .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  must I dare to woo you,
  I whom man never wooed?
  
  to let my hand glide under the cloak.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  O you will stay! these arms
  Making so soft and white a bond around you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I also begin
  to love that way, Orestes,
  Feeling the hot hard flesh move under the loose cloth, shudder
  against me.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah, your mouth, Ah,
  The burning-kiss me-
  ORESTES   We shall never ascend this mountain.
  
  So it might come true: we have to be tough against them,
  Our dreams and visions, or they true themselves into flesh.
  
  It is
  sweet: I faint for it: the old stones here
  Have seen more and not moved.
  
  A custom of the house.
  
  To
  accept you, little Electra, and go my journey
  To-morrow: you'd call cheating.
  
  Therefore: we shall not go up
  this mountain dearest, dearest,
  To-night nor ever.
  
  It's Clytemnestra in you.
  
  But the dead are a
  weak tribe.
  
  If I had Agamemnon's
  We'd live happily sister and lord it in Mycenae-be a king like
  the others royalty and incest
  Run both in the stream of the blood.
  
  Who scrubbed the stones
  there?
  
  ELECTRA   Slaves.
  
  O fire burn me! Enter and lay waste,
  Deflower, trample, break down, pillage the little city,
  Make what breach you will, with flesh or a spear, give it to the
  spoiler.
  
  See, as I tear the garment.
  
  What if I called it cheating?
  
  Be cruel and treacherous: I'll run
  my chances
  On the bitter mercies of to-morrow.
  
  ORESTES   Bitter they would be.
  
  No.
  
  ELECTRA   It's clear
  that for this reason
  You'd sneak out of Mycenae and be lost outward.
  
  Taste first, bite
  the apple, once dared and tried
  Desire will be not terrible.
  
  It's doglike to run off whining.
  
  Remember
  it was I that urged
  Yesterday's triumph.
  
  You: life was enough: let them live.
  
  I drove
  on, burning; your mind, reluctant metal,
  I dipped it in fire and forged it sharp, day after day I beat and
  burned against you, and forged
  A sword: I the arm.
  
  Are you sorry it's done?
  
  Now again with
  hammer and burning heat I beat against you,
  You will not be sorry.
  
  We two of all the world, we alone,
  Are fit for each other, we have so wrought .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  O eyes scorning
  the world, storm-feathered hawk my hands
  Caught out of the air and made you a king over this rock, O axe
  with the gold helve, O star
  Alone over the storm, beacon to men over blown seas, you will
  not flee fate, you will take
  What the Gods give.
  
  What is a man not ruling?
  
  An ant in the hill:
  ruler or slave the choice is,
  Or a runaway slave, your pilgrim portion, buffeted over the
  borders of the lands, publicly
  Whipped in the cities.
  
  But you, you will bind the north-star on
  your forehead, you will stand up in Mycenae
  Stone, and a king.
  
  ORESTES   I am stone enough not to be changed by
  words, nor by the sweet and burning flame of you,
  Beautiful Electra.
  
  ELECTRA   Well then: we've wasted our night.
  
  See, there's
  the morning star
  I might have draggled into a metaphor of you.
  
  A fool: a boy:
  no king.
  
  ORESTES   It would have been better
  To have parted kindlier, for it is likely
  We shall have no future meeting.
  
  ELECTRA   You will let this crime (the
  God commanded) that dirtied the old stones here
  Make division forever?
  
  ORESTES   Not the crime, the wakening.
  
  That deed is
  past, it is finished, things past
  Make no division afterward, they have no power, they have become
  nothing at all: this much
  I have learned at a crime's knees.
  
  ELECTRA   Yet we are divided.
  
  ORESTES Because I
  have suddenly awakened, I will not waste inward
  Upon humanity, having found a fairer object.
  
  ELECTRA   Some nymph of
  the field?
  
  I knew this coldness
  Had a sick root: a girl in the north told me about the hill-shepherds
  who living in solitude
  Turn beast with the ewes, their oreads baa to them through the
  matted fleece and they run mad, what madness
  Met you in the night and sticks to you?
  
  ORESTES   I left the madness of the
  house, to-night in the dark, with you it walks yet.
  
  How shall I tell you what I have learned?
  
  Your mind is like a
  hawk's or like a lion's, this knowledge
  Is out of the order of your mind, a stranger language.
  
  To wild
  beasts and the blood of kings
  A verse blind in the book.
  
  ELECTRA   At least my eyes can see dawn graying:
  tell and not mock me, our moment
  Dies in a moment.
  
  ORESTES   Here is the last labor
  To spend on humanity.
  
  I saw a vision of us move in the dark:
  all that we did or dreamed of
  Regarded each other, the man pursued the woman, the woman
  clung to the man, warriors and kings
  Strained at each other in the darkness, all loved or fought inward,
  each one of the lost people
  Sought the eyes of another that another should praise him; sought
  never his own but another's; the net of desire
  Had every nerve drawn to the center, so that they writhed like a
  full draught of fishes, all matted
  In the one mesh; when they look backward they see only a man
  standing at the beginning,
  Or forward, a man at the end; or if upward, men in the shining
  bitter sky striding and feasting,
  Whom you call Gods .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It is all turned inward, all your desires incestuous, the woman the
  serpent, the man the rose-red cavern,
  Both human, worship forever .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ELECTRA   You have dreamed wretchedly.
  
  ORESTES I have
  seen the dreams of the people and not dreamed them.
  
  As for me, I have slain my mother.
  
  ELECTRA   No more?
  
  ORESTES   And the gate's open,
  the gray boils over the mountain, I have greater
  Kindred than dwell under a roof.
  
  Didn't I say this would be dark
  to you?
  
  I have cut the meshes
  And fly like a freed falcon.
  
  To-night, lying on the hillside, sick
  with those visions, I remembered
  The knife in the stalk of my humanity; I drew and it broke;
  I entered the life of the brown forest
  And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone,
  I felt the changes in the veins
  In the throat of the mountain, a grain in many centuries, we have
  our own time, not yours; and I was the stream
  Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was
  the stars,
  Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own
  summit; and I was the darkness
  Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me.
  
  I was
  mankind also, a moving lichen
  On the cheek of the round stone .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  they have not made words
  for it, to go behind things, beyond hours and ages,
  And be all things in all time, in their returns and passages, in the
  motionless and timeless center,
  In the white of the fire .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  how can I express the excellence
  I have found, that has no color but clearness;
  No honey but ecstasy; nothing wrought nor remembered; no
  undertone nor silver second murmur
  That rings in love's voice, I and my loved are one; no desire but
  fulfilled; no passion but peace,
  The pure flame and the white, fierier than any passion; no time
  but spheral eternity: Electra,
  Was that your name before this life dawned
  ELECTRA   Here is mere death.
  
  Death like a triumph I'd have paid to keep you
  A king in high Mycenae: but here is shameful death, to die because
  I have lost you.
  
  They'll say
  Having done justice Agamemnon’s son ran mad and was lost in
  the mountain; but Agamemnon's daughter
  Hanged herself from a beam of the house: O bountiful hands of
  justice! This horror draws upon me
  Like stone walking.
  
  ORESTES   What fills men's mouths is nothing; and your
  threat is nothing; I have fallen in love outward.
  
  If I believed you it is I that am like stone walking.
  
  ELECTRA   I can endure
  even to hate you,
  But that's no matter.
  
  Strength's good.
  
  You are lost.
  
  I here remember
  the honor of the house, and Agamemnon's.
  
  She turned and entered the ancient house.
  
  Orestes walked in the
  clear dawn; men say that a serpent
  Killed him in high Arcadia.
  
  But young or old, few years or many,
  signified less than nothing
  To him who had climbed the tower beyond time, consciously,
  and cast humanity, entered the earlier fountain.

• The Trap Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I am not well civilized, really alien here: trust me not.
  
  I can understand the guns and the airplanes,
  The other conveniences leave me cold.
  
  "We must adjust our economics to the new abundance .
  
  Of what?
  
  Toys: motors, music-boxes,
  Paper, fine clothes, leisure, diversion.
  
  I honestly believe (but really an alien here: trust me not)
  Blind war, compared to this kind of life,
  Has nobility, famine has dignity.
  
  Be happy, adjust your economics to the new abundance;
  One is neither saint nor devil, to wish
  The intolerable nobler alternative.

• The Treasure Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Mountains, a moment's earth-waves rising and hollowing; the
  earth too's an ephemerid; the stars-
  Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their
  summer, they spiral
  Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives
  long, the whole sky's
  Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf
  before birth, and the gulf
  After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of
  eternity is nothing too tiresome,
  Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of
  activity.
  
  Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue
  and epilogue merely
  To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called
  life?
  
  I fancy
  That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection,
  a jump of the breath at that silence;
  Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure
  says "Ah!" but the treasure's the essence;
  Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he
  gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.

• The Truce And The Peace Read Poem Log in to favourite

  (NOVEMBER, 1918)
  Peace now for every fury has had her day,
  Their natural make is moribund, they cease,
  They carry the inward seeds of quick decay,
  Build breakwaters for storm but build on peace.
  
  The mountains' peace answers the peace of the stars,
  Our petulances are cracked against their term.
  
  God built our peace and plastered it with wars,
  Those frescoes fade, flake off, peace remains firm.
  
  In the beginning before light began
  We lay or fluttered blind in burdened wombs,
  And like that first so is the last of man,
  When under death for husband the amorous tombs
  Are covered and conceived; nine months go by
  No midwife called, nine years no baby's cry.
  
  II
  Peace now, though purgatory fires were hot
  They always had a heart something like ice
  That coldly peered and wondered, suffering not
  Nor pleased in any park, nor paradise
  Of slightly swelling breasts and beautiful arms
  And throat engorged with very carnal blood.
  
  It coldly peered and wondered, "Strong God your charms
  Are glorious, I remember solitude.
  
  Before youth towered we knew a time of truth
  To have eyes was nearly rapture.
  
  " Peace now, for war
  Will find the cave that childhood found and youth.
  
  Ten million lives are stolen and not one star
  Dulled; wars die out, life will die out, death cease,
  Beauty lives always and the beauty of peace.
  
  III
  Peace to the world in time or in a year,
  In the inner world I have touched the instant peace.
  
  Man's soul's a flawless crystal coldly clear,
  A cold white mansion that he yields in lease
  To tenant dreams and tyrants from the brain
  And riotous burnings of the lovelier flesh.
  
  We pour strange wines and purples all in vain.
  
  The crystal remains pure, the mansion fresh.
  
  All the Asian bacchanals and those from Thrace
  Lived there and left no wine-mark on the walls.
  
  What were they doing in that more sacred place
  All the Asian and the Thracian bacchanals?
  
  Peace to the world to-morrow or in a year,
  Peace in that mansion white, that crystal clear.
  
  IV
  Peace now poor earth.
  
  They fought for freedom's sake,
  She was starving in a corner while they fought.
  
  They knew not whom they stabbed by Onega Lake,
  Whom lashed from Archangel, whom loved, whom sought.
  
  How can she die, she is the blood unborn,
  The energy in earth's arteries beating red,
  The world will flame with her in some great morn,
  The whole great world flame with her, and we be dead.
  
  Here in the west it grows by dim degrees,
  In the east flashed and will flame terror and light.
  
  Peace now poor earth, peace to that holier peace
  Deep in the soul held secret from all sight.
  
  That crystal, the pure home, the holier peace,
  Fires flaw not, scars the crudest cannot crease.
  
  V
  South of the Big Sur River up the hill
  Three graves are marked thick weeds and grasses heap,
  Under the forest there I have stood still
  Hours, thinking it the sweetest place to sleep , .
  
  .
  
  Strewing all-sufficient death with compliments
  Sincere and unrequired, coveting peace .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Boards at the head not stones, the text's rude paints
  Mossed, rain-rubbed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  wasting hours of scanty lease
  To admire their peace made perfect.
  
  From that height
  But for the trees the whole valley might be seen,
  But for the heavy dirt, the eye-pits no light
  Enters, the heavy dirt, the grass growing green
  Over the dirt, the molelike secretness,
  The immense withdrawal, the dirt, the quiet, the peace.
  
  VI
  Women cried that morning, bells rocked with mirth,
  We all were glad a long while afterward,
  But still in dreary places of the earth
  A hundred hardly fed shall labor hard
  To clothe one belly and stuff it with soft meat,
  Blood paid for peace but still those poor shall buy it,
  This sweat of slaves is no good wine but yet
  Sometimes it climbs to the brain.
  
  Be happy and quiet,
  Be happy and live, be quiet or God might wake.
  
  He sleeps in the mountain that is heart of man's heart,
  He also in promontory fists, and make
  Of stubborn-muscled limbs, he will not start
  For a little thing .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  his great hands grope, unclose,
  Feel out for the main pillars .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  pull down the house .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  VII
  After all, after all we endured, who has grown wise?
  
  We take our mortal momentary hour
  With too much gesture, the derisive skies
  Twinkle against our wrongs, our rights, our power.
  
  Look up the night, starlight's a steadying draught
  For nerves at angry tension.
  
  They have all meant well,
  Our enemies and the knaves at whom we've laughed,
  The liars, the clowns in office, the kings in hell,
  fhey have all meant well in the main .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  some of them tried
  The mountain road of tolerance .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  They have made war,
  Conspired, oppressed, robbed, murdered, lied and lied,
  Meant well, played the loud fool .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and star by star
  Winter Orion pursues the Pleiades
  In pale and huge parade, silence and peace.
  
  VIII
  That ice within the soul, the admonisher
  Of madness when we're wildest, the unwinking eye
  That measures all things with indifferent stare,
  Choosing far stars to check near objects by,
  That quiet lake inside and underneath,
  Strong, undisturbed by any angel of strife,
  Being so tranquil seems the presence of death,
  Being so central seems the essence of life.
  
  Is it perhaps that death and life make truce
  In neutral zone while their old feud beyond
  Fires the towered cities?
  
  Surely for a strange use
  He sphered that eye of flawless diamond.
  
  It does not serve him but with line and rod
  Measures him, how indeed should God serve God?
  
  IX
  It does not worship him, it will not serve.
  
  And death and life within that Eye combine,
  Within that only untorturable nerve
  Of those that make a man, within that shrine
  Which there is nothing ever can profane,
  Where life and death are sister and brother and lovers,
  The golden voice of Christ were heard in vain,
  The holy spirit of God visibly hovers.
  
  Small-breasted girls, lithe women heavy-haired,
  Loves that once grew into our nerves and veins,
  Yours Freedom was desire that deeper dared
  To the citadel where mastery remains,
  Yours to the spirit .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  discount the penny that is
  Ungivable, this Eye, this God, this Peace.
  
  All in a simple innocence I strove
  To give myself away to any power,
  Wasting on women's bodies wealth of love,
  Worshipping every sunrise mountain tower;
  Some failure mocked me still denying perfection,
  Parts of me might be spended not the whole,
  I sought of wine surrender and self-correction,
  I failed, I could not give away my soul.
  
  Again seeking to give myself I sought
  Outward in vain through all things, out through God,
  And tried all heights, all gulfs, all dreams, all thought.
  
  I found this wisdom on the wonderful road,
  The essential Me cannot be given away,
  The single Eye, God cased in blood-shot clay.
  
  XI
  Peace to the world in time or in a year,
  But always all our lives this peace was ours.
  
  Peace is not hard to have, it lies more near
  Than breathing to the breast.
  
  When brigand powers
  Of anger or pain or the sick dream of sin
  Break our soul's house outside the ruins we weep.
  
  We look through the breached wall, why there within
  All the red while our peace was lying asleep.
  
  Smiling in dreams while the broad knives drank blood,
  The robbers triumphed, the roof burned overhead,
  The eternal living and untroubled God
  Lying asleep upon a lily bed.
  
  Men screamed, the bugles screamed, walls broke in the air,
  We never knew till then that He was there.

• The Wind-Struck Music Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Ed Stiles and old Tom Birnam went up to their cattle on the
  bare hills
  Above Mai Paso; they'd ridden under the stars' white death,
  when they reached the ridge the huge tiger-lily
  Of a certain cloud-lapped astonishing autumn sunrise opened all
  its petals.
  
  Ed Stiles pulled in his horse,
  That flashy palamino he rode cream-color, heavy white mane,
  white tail, his pride and said
  "Look, Tom.
  
  My God.
  
  Ain't that a beautiful sunrise?
  
  " Birnam
  drew down his mouth, set the hard old chin,
  And whined: "Now, Ed: listen here: I haven't an ounce of
  poetry in all my body.
  
  It's cows we're after.
  
  "
  Ed laughed and followed; they began to sort the heifers out of
  the herd.
  
  One red little deer-legged creature
  Rolled her wild eyes and ran away down the hill, the old man
  hard after her.
  
  She ran through a deep-cut gully,
  And Birnam's piebald would have made a clean jump but the clay lip
  Crumbled under his take-off, he slipped and
  Spilled in the pit,
  flailed with four hooves and came out scrambling.
  
  Stiles saw them vanish,
  Then the pawing horse and the flapping stirrups.
  
  He rode and
  looked down and saw the old man in the gulley-bottom
  Flat on his back, most grimly gazing up at the sky.
  
  He saw the
  earth banks, the sparse white grass,
  The strong dark sea a thousand feet down below, red with reflections
  of clouds.
  
  He said "My God,
  Tom, are you hurt?
  
  " Who answered slowly, "No, Ed.
  
  I'm only lying here thinking o' my four sons" biting the words
  Carefully between his lips "big handsome men, at present lolling
  in bed in their .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  silk .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  pyjamas .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And why the devil I keep on working?
  
  " He stood up slowly and
  wiped the dirt from his cheek, groaned, spat,
  And climbed up the clay bank.
  
  Stiles laughed: "Tom, I can't tell
  you: I guess you like to.
  
  By God I guess
  You like the sunrises.
  
  " The old man growled in his throat and said
  "Catch me my horse.
  
  "
  This old man died last winter, having
  lived eighty-one years under open sky,
  Concerned with cattle, horses and hunting, no thought nor emotion
  that all his ancestors since the ice-age
  Could not have comprehended.
  
  I call that a good life; narrow,
  but vastly better than most
  Men's lives, and beyond comparison more beautiful; the wind-struck
  music man's bones were moulded to be the harp for.

• Thebaid Read Poem Log in to favourite

  How many turn back toward dreams and magic, how many
  children
  Run home to Mother Church, Father State,
  To find in their arms the delicious warmth and folding of souls.
  
  The age weakens and settles home toward old ways.
  
  An age of renascent faith: Christ said, Marx wrote, Hitler says,
  And though it seems absurd we believe.
  
  Sad children, yes.
  
  It is lonely to be adult, you need a father.
  
  With a little practice you'll believe anything.
  
  Faith returns, beautiful, terrible, ridiculous,
  And men are willing to die and kill for their faith.
  
  Soon come the wars of religion; centuries have passed
  Since the air so trembled with intense faith and hatred.
  
  Soon, perhaps, whoever wants to live harmlessly
  Must find a cave in the mountain or build a cell
  Of the red desert rock under dry junipers,
  And avoid men, live with more kindly wolves
  And luckier ravens, waiting for the end of the age.
  
  Hermit from stone cell
  Gazing with great stunned eyes,
  What extravagant miracle
  Has amazed them with light,
  What visions, what crazy glory, what wings?
  
  I see the sun set and rise
  And the beautiful desert sand
  And the stars at night,
  The incredible magnificence of things.
  
  I the last living man
  That sees the real earth and skies,
  Actual life and real death.
  
  The others are all prophets and believers
  Delirious with fevers of faith.

• Theory Of Truth Read Poem Log in to favourite

  (Reference to The Women at Point Sur)
  I stand near Soberanes Creek, on the knoll over the sea, west of
  the road.
  
  I remember
  This is the very place where Arthur Barclay, a priest in revolt,
  proposed three questions to himself:
  First, is there a God and of what nature?
  
  Second, whether there's
  anything after we die but worm's meat?
  
  Third, how should men live?
  
  Large time-worn questions no
  doubt; yet he touched his answers, they are not unattainable;
  But presently lost them again in the glimmer of insanity.
  
  How
  many minds have worn these questions; old coins
  Rubbed faceless, dateless.
  
  The most have despaired and accepted
  doctrine; the greatest have achieved answers, but always
  With aching strands of insanity in them.
  
  I think of Lao-tze; and the dear beauty of the Jew whom they
  crucified but he lived, he was greater than Rome;
  And godless Buddha under the boh-tree, straining through his
  mind the delusions and miseries of human life.
  
  Why does insanity always twist the great answers?
  
  Because only
  tormented persons want truth.
  
  Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and
  women, not truth.
  
  Only if the mind
  Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness:
  then it hates its life-cage and seeks further,
  And finds, if it is powerful enough.
  
  But instantly the private
  agony that made the search
  Muddles the finding.
  
  Here was a man who envied the chiefs of
  the provinces of China their power and pride,
  And envied Confucius his fame for wisdom.
  
  Tortured by hardly
  conscious envy he hunted the truth of things,
  Caught it, and stained it through with his private impurity.
  
  He
  praised inaction, silence, vacancy: why?
  
  Because the princes and officers were full of business, and wise
  Confucius of words.
  
  Here was a man who was born a bastard, and among the people
  That more than any in the world valued race-purity, chastity, the
  prophetic splendors of the race of David.
  
  Oh intolerable wound, dimly perceived.
  
  Too loving to curse his
  mother, desert-driven, devil-haunted,
  The beautiful young poet found truth in the desert, but found also
  Fantastic solution of hopeless anguish.
  
  The carpenter was not his
  father?
  
  Because God was his father,
  Not a man sinning, but the pure holiness and power of God.
  
  His personal anguish and insane solution
  Have stained an age; nearly two thousand years are one vast poem
  drunk with the wine of his blood.
  
  And here was another Saviour, a prince in India,
  A man who loved and pitied with such intense comprehension of
  pain that he was willing to annihilate
  Nature and the earth and stars, life and mankind, to annul the
  suffering.
  
  He also sought and found truth,
  And mixed it with his private impurity, the pity, the denials.
  
  Then
  search for truth is foredoomed and frustrate?
  
  Only stained fragments?
  
  Until the mind has turned its love from
  itself and man, from parts to the whole.

• Thurso’s Landing Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  The coast-road was being straightened and repaired again,
  A group of men labored at the steep curve
  Where it falls from the north to Mill Creek.
  
  They scattered and hid
  Behind cut banks, except one blond young man
  Who stooped over the rock and strolled away smiling
  As if he shared a secret joke with the dynamite;
  It waited until he had passed back of a boulder,
  Then split its rock cage; a yellowish torrent
  Of fragments rose up the air and the echoes bumped
  From mountain to mountain.
  
  The men returned slowly
  And took up their dropped tools, while a banner of dust
  Waved over the gorge on the northwest wind, very high
  Above the heads of the forest.
  
  Some distance west of the road,
  On the promontory above the triangle
  Of glittering ocean that fills the gorge-mouth,
  A woman and a lame man from the farm below
  Had been watching, and turned to go down the hill.
  
  The young
  woman looked back,
  Widening her violet eyes under the shade of her hand.
  
  "I think
  they'll blast again in a minute.
  
  "
  And the man: "I wish they'd let the poor old road be.
  
  I don't
  like improvements.
  
  " "Why not?
  
  " "They bring in the world;
  We're well without it.
  
  " His lameness gave him some look of age
  but he was young too; tall and thin-faced,
  With a high wavering nose.
  
  "Isn't he amusing," she said, "that
  boy Rick Armstrong, the dynamite man,
  How slowly he walks away after he lights the fuse.
  
  He loves to
  show off.
  
  Reave likes him, too,"
  She added; and they clambered down the path in the rock-face,
  little dark specks
  Between the great headland rock and the bright blue sea.
  
  II
  The road-workers had made their camp
  North of this headland, where the sea-cliff was broken down and
  sloped to a cove.
  
  The violet-eyed woman's husband,
  Reave Thurso, rode down the slope to the camp in the gorgeous
  autumn sundown, his hired man Johnny Luna
  Riding behind him.
  
  The road-men had just quit work and four
  or five were bathing in the purple surf-edge,
  The others talked by the tents; blue smoke fragrant with food
  and oak-wood drifted from the cabin stove-pipe
  And slowly went fainting up the vast hill.
  
  Thurso drew rein by
  a group of men at a tent door
  And frowned at them without speaking, square-shouldered and
  heavy-jawed, too heavy with strength for so young a man,
  He chose one of the men with his eyes.
  
  "You're Danny Woodruff,
  aren't you, that drives the tractor?
  
  " Who smiled
  And answered "Maybe.
  
  What then?
  
  " "Why, nothing, except you
  broke my fence and you've got to fix it.
  
  " "You don't say,"
  He said laughing.
  
  "Did somebody break your fence?
  
  Well, that's
  too bad.
  
  " "My man here saw you do it.
  
  He warned you out of the field.
  
  " "Oh, was I warned?
  
  " He turned
  to Luna: "What did I say to you, cowboy?
  
  "
  "You say, you say," Luna's dark face flushed black, "you say
  'Go to hell.
  
  '
  " Woodruff gravely, to Thurso:
  "That's what I say.
  
  " The farmer had a whip in his hand, a hotter
  man might have struck, but he carefully
  Hung it on the saddle-horn by the thong at the butt, dismounted,
  and said, "You'll fix it though.
  
  " He was somewhat
  Short-coupled, but so broad in the chest and throat, and obviously
  all oak, that Woodruff recoiled a step,
  Saying "If you've got a claim for damages, take it to the county.
  
  "
  "I'm taking it nearer hand.
  
  You'll fix the fence.
  
  " Woodruffs companions
  Began to come in between, and one said "Wait for him
  Until he fixes it, your cows will be down the road.
  
  "
  Thurso shook his head slightly and bored forward
  Toward his one object; who felt the persecuting
  Pale eyes under dark brows dazzle resistance.
  
  He was glad the bathers came up the shore, to ask
  What the dispute was, their presence released his mind
  A moment from the obstinate eyes.
  
  The blithe young firer
  Of dynamite blasts, Rick Armstrong, came in foremost,
  Naked and very beautiful, all his blond body
  Gleaming from the sea; he'd been one or two evenings
  A guest at the farmhouse, and now took Thurso's part
  So gracefully that the tractor-driver, already
  Unnerved by that leaden doggedness, was glad to yield.
  
  He'd mend the fence in the morning: Oh, sure, he wanted
  To do the right thing: but Thurso's manner
  Had put him off.
  
  The group dissolved apart, having made for
  a moment its unconscious beauty
  In the vast landscape above the ocean in the colored evening;
  the naked bodies of the young bathers
  Polished with light, against the brown and blue denim core of
  the rest; and the ponies, one brown, one piebald,
  Compacted into the group, the Spanish-Indian horseman dark
  bronze above them, under broad red
  Heavens leaning to the lonely mountain.
  
  III
  In the moonlight two hours before Sunday dawn
  Rick Armstrong went on foot over the hill
  Toward the farmhouse in the deep gorge, where it was dark,
  And he smelled the stream.
  
  Thurso had invited him
  To go deer-hunting with them, seeing lights in the house
  He hurried down, not to make his friends wait.
  
  He passed under a lonely noise in the sky
  And wondered at it, and remembered the great cable
  That spanned the gorge from the hill, with a rusted iron skip
  Hanging from it like a stuck black moon; relics,
  With other engines on the headland, of ancient lime-kilns
  High up the canyon, from which they shot the lime
  To the promontory along the airy cable-way
  To be shipped by sea.
  
  The works had failed; the iron skip
  Stuck on its rusted pulleys would never move again
  Until it fell, but to make a desolate creaking
  In the mountain east-wind that poured down the gorge
  Every clear night.
  
  He looked for it and could not find it
  Against the white sky, but stumbled over a root
  And hurried down to the house.
  
  There were layered smells of
  horses and leather
  About the porch; the door stood half open, in the yellow slot
  Of lamplight appeared two faces, Johnny Luna's dark hollow
  Egyptian profile and Helen Thurso's
  Very white beyond, her wide-parted violet eyes looked black
  and her lips moved.
  
  Her husband's wide chest
  Eclipsed the doorway.
  
  "Here you are.
  
  I was afraid you wouldn't
  wake up.
  
  Come in," Thurso said,
  "Coffee and bacon, it will be long to lunch.
  
  " A fourth in the
  room was the lame man, Reave Thurso's brother,
  Who said at parting, "Take care of Helen, won't you, Reave,
  Don't tire her out.
  
  " He was not of the party but had risen to see
  them off.
  
  She answered from the porch, laughing,
  The light from the door gilding her cheek, "I'll not be the tired
  one, Mark, by evening.
  
  Pity the others.
  
  "
  "Let the men do the shooting, Helen, spare yourself.
  
  Killing's
  against your nature, it would hurt with unhappy thought
  Some later time.
  
  " "Ah," she answered, "not so gentle as you
  think.
  
  Good-bye, brother.
  
  "
  They mounted the drooping horses and rode up canyon
  Between black trees, under that lonely creaking in the sky, and
  turned southward
  Along the coast-road to enter a darker canyon.
  
  The horses jerked at the bridle-hands,
  Nosing out a way for the stammering hooves
  Along the rocks of a ribbed creek-bed; thence a path upward
  To the height of a ridge; in that clear the red moonset
  Appeared between murky hills, like a burning ship
  On the world's verge.
  
  Thurso and Luna stealthily dismounted.
  
  They stole two ways down the starry-glimmering slope like
  assassins, above the black fur of forest, and vanished
  In the shifty gray.
  
  The two others remained, Armstrong looked
  wistfully
  Toward his companion through the high reddish gloom, and
  saw the swell of her breast and droop of her throat
  Darkling against the low moon-scarred west.
  
  She whispered and
  said, "The poor thing may drive up hill toward us:
  And I'll not fire, do you want to trade rifles with me?
  
  The old
  one that Reave has lent you is little use.
  
  "
  He answered, "I guess one gun's as good as another, you can't
  see the bead, you can't see the notch.
  
  " "Oh: well.
  
  The light will grow.
  
  " They were silent a time, sitting and holding
  the horses, the red moon on the sea-line
  Suddenly foundered; still the east had nothing.
  
  "We'd better take ourselves
  Out of the sky, and tie up the horses.
  
  " She began to move, down
  the way lately climbed, the cowboy's
  Pony trailing behind her, Armstrong led Reave's.
  
  He saw her
  white shirt below him gleam in the starlight
  Like bare shoulders above the shadow.
  
  They unbridled the horses
  and tethered them to buckthorn bushes, and went back
  Into the sky; but lay close against the ridge to be hidden, for a
  cloud whitened.
  
  Orion and Sirius
  Stood southward in the mid heaven, and Armstrong said,
  "They're strange at dawn, see, they're not autumn stars,
  They belong to last March.
  
  " "Maybe next March," she answered
  Without looking.
  
  "Tell me how you've charmed Reave
  To make him love you?
  
  He never has cared for a friend before,
  Cold and lonely by nature.
  
  He seems to love you.
  
  "
  "Why: nothing.
  
  If he lacks friends perhaps it's only
  Because this country has been too vacant for him
  To make choices from.
  
  " "No," she answered, "he's cold,
  And all alone in himself.
  
  Well.
  
  His goodness is strength.
  
  He's never set his mind on anything yet
  But got it with a strong hand.
  
  His brother, you met this morning,
  Is very different, a weak man of course,
  But kindly and full of pity toward every creature, but really at heart
  As cold as Reave.
  
  I never loved hunting, and he's
  Persuaded me to hate it.
  
  Let him persuade
  Reave if he could!" Armstrong said, "Why did you come then?
  
  "
  "Ah?
  
  To watch things be killed.
  
  "
  They heard the wind
  Flustering below, and felt the sallow increase of clearness
  On grass-blades, and the girl's face, and the far sea,
  A light of visions, faint and a virgin.
  
  One rifle-shot
  Snapped the still dawn; Armstrong cradled his gun
  But nothing came up the hill.
  
  The cloud-line eastward
  Suddenly flushed with rose-color flame, and standing
  Rays of transparent purple shadow appeared
  Behind the fired fleece.
  
  Helen Thurso sighed and stood up,
  "Let's see if we can't lead one of the horses down,
  Now light has come, to bring up the corpse.
  
  " "The .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  for
  what?
  
  "
  "The meat," she said impatiently, "the killed thing.
  
  It's a hard
  climb.
  
  "
  "You think they got it?
  
  " "Couldn't fail; but other years
  They've taken two in that trap.
  
  " Nearly straight down,
  At the edge of the wood, in the pool of blue shade in the cleft
  hill,
  The two men were seen, one burdened, like mites in a bowl; and
  Helen with a kind of triumph: "Look down there:
  What size Reave Thurso is really: one of those little dirty black
  ants that come to dead things could carry him
  With the deer added.
  
  "
  They drove a horse down the headlong
  pitch; the sun came up like a man shouting
  While they climbed back, then Helen halted for breath.
  
  Thurso
  tightened the lashings under the saddle,
  That held his booty on the pony's back, and said to Armstrong,
  "That tree that stands alone on the spur,
  It looks like a match: its trunk's twenty feet through.
  
  The biggest
  redwoods left on the coast are there,
  The lumbermen couldn't reach them.
  
  "
  Johnny Luna, when they
  reached the ridge,
  Was sent home leading his horse, with the buck mounted.
  
  The
  others rode east, the two men ahead, and Helen
  Regarding their heads and shoulders against the sharp sky or
  the sides of hills; they left the redwood canyons
  And rode a long while among interminable gray ranges bushed
  on the north with oak and lupin;
  Farther they wandered among flayed bison-shaped hills, and rode
  at noon under sparse bull-pines,
  And so returned, having seen no life at all
  Except high up the sun the black vultures,
  Some hawks hunting the gorges, and a far coyote.
  
  In the afternoon, nearing toward home, it was Helen
  Who saw five deer strung on a ridge.
  
  "Oh.
  
  Look.
  
  So I've betrayed them," she said bitterly.
  
  Reave said to Armstrong,
  "Your shot: the buck to the north," and while he spoke fired, but
  the other
  Had raised his cheek from the rifle-stock to look
  At Helen angrily laughing, her face brilliant
  In the hard sunlight, with lakes of deep shade
  Under the brows and the chin; when he looked back
  The ridge was cleared.
  
  "Why didn't you let him have it?
  
  You'd such an easy shot," Thurso said,
  "Against the cloud, mine was among the bushes,
  I saw him fall and roll over.
  
  " "Be very happy,"
  Helen said.
  
  "He was hard hit, for he ran down hill.
  
  That makes you shine.
  
  "
  They labored across the gorge
  And climbed up to the ridge.
  
  A spongy scarlet thing
  Was found at the foot of a green oak-bush and Helen
  Came and saw it.
  
  "He was hit in the lung," Reave said,
  "Coughed up a froth of blood and ran down hill.
  
  I have to get him.
  
  " "It looks like a red toadstool:
  Red scum on rotten wood.
  
  Does it make you sick?
  
  Not a bit: it makes you happy.
  
  " "Why do you come hunting, Helen,
  If you hate hunting?
  
  Keep still at least.
  
  As for being happy:
  Look where I have to go down.
  
  " He showed her the foamy spots
  of blood, on the earth and the small leaves,
  Going down a steep thicket that seemed impassable.
  
  She answered,
  "Let the poor thing die in peace.
  
  " "It would seem a pity,"
  He answered, "to let him suffer; besides the waste.
  
  " Armstrong
  looked down and said, "He'll be in the creek-bed.
  
  I'll go down there and work up the gulch, if you go down here.
  
  "
  "You'd never find him without the blood-trail,"
  Reave answered.
  
  Then Helen suddenly went back and touched
  the foam of blood on the ground, dipping four fingers,
  And returned and said, "I was afraid to do it, so I did it.
  
  Now
  I'm no better than you.
  
  Don't go down.
  
  Please, Reave.
  
  Let's hurry and go home.
  
  I'm tired.
  
  " Reave said
  to Armstrong, "That would be best, if you'd take her home.
  
  It's only a mile and a half, help her with the horses, won't you?
  
  Take mine too.
  
  I'll hang the buck in a tree
  Near where I find him, and come fetch him to-morrow.
  
  " "If you
  want," Armstrong said.
  
  Helen clenched
  Her blood-tipped fingers and felt them stick to the palm.
  
  "All
  right.
  
  I'll do
  What you've chosen," she said with smoothed lips.
  
  "Mark wins,
  he said I'd be tired.
  
  But he was wrong,"
  Opening her hand, regarding the red-lined nails,
  "To think me all milk and kindness.
  
  " Thurso went down
  The thicket; and Helen: "Nothing could turn him back.
  
  He's never set his mind on anything yet
  But snuffled like a bloodhound to the bitter end.
  
  " They heard
  the branches
  Breaking below, and returned by the open slope
  To the horses across the creek.
  
  They rode softly
  Down the canyon; Helen said, "I'm not tired.
  
  Do you ever think about death?
  
  I've seen you play with it,
  Strolling away while the fuse fizzed in the rock.
  
  "
  "Hell no, that was all settled when they made the hills.
  
  "
  "Did you notice how high he held his bright head
  And the branched horns, keen with happiness?
  
  Nothing told him
  That all would break in a moment and the blood choke his throat.
  
  I hope that poor stag
  Had many loves in his life.
  
  " He looked curiously,
  A little moved, at her face; too pale, like a white flame
  That has form but no brilliance in the light of day;
  The wide violet eyes hollowed with points of craving darkness
  Under the long dark lashes; and the charcoal mark
  Across her slightly hollowed cheek, where a twig had crossed it
  When they rode the burnt hillside.
  
  He said: "I ought
  ToVe gone with Reave, it doesn't seem fair to let him
  Sweat alone in that jungle.
  
  " "He enjoys toil.
  
  You don't know him yet.
  
  Give him a blood-trail to follow,
  That's all he wants for Christmas.
  
  What he's got's nothing to him,
  His game's the getting.
  
  But slow, slow: be hours yet.
  
  From here we can choose ways, and though it's a good deal longer,
  There's daylight left, we'll go by the head of the hill: up there
  you can see the whole coast
  And a thousand hills.
  
  Look," she said laughing,
  "What the crooked bushes have done," showing her light shirt
  Torn at the breast, and a long red scratch
  Under the bright smooth breast.
  
  He felt in his mind
  A moving dizziness, and shifted his body backward
  From the saddle-horn.
  
  A curl of sea-cloud stood on the head of the hill
  Like a wave breaking against the wind; but when they reached
  it, windows of clearness in it were passing
  From the northwest, through which the mountain sea-wall looked
  abrupt as dreams, from Lobos like a hand on the sea
  To the offshore giant at Point Sur southward.
  
  Straight down
  through the coursing mists like a crack in the mountain sea-root,
  Mill Creek Canyon, like a crack in the naked root of a dead pine
  when the bark peels off.
  
  The bottom
  Of the fissure was black with redwood, and lower
  Green with alders; between the black and the green the painted
  roof of the farmhouse, like a dropped seed,
  Thurso's house, like a grain of corn in the crack of a plank, where
  the hens can't reach it.
  
  Cloud steered between;
  Helen Thurso said "What if the rut is a rock canyon,
  Look how Fm stuck in a rut: do I have to live there?
  
  And Reave's old mother's like a white-headed hawk.
  
  Your job here's nearly finished, where will you go?
  
  "
  "I haven't thought: all places are like each other:
  Maybe Nevada in the spring.
  
  There's work all over.
  
  " "I," she said, trembling; "it seems cold
  up here.
  
  I hate the sea-fog.
  
  Now let's look east.
  
  " They had tied
  The horses to the highest bushes on the north slope,
  And walked on the open dome of the hill, they crossed it
  And the east was clear; the beautiful desolate inhuman range
  beyond range of summits all seen at once,
  Dry bright and quiet and their huge blue shadows.
  
  Helen said
  faintly,
  "He's down there somewhere.
  
  It's that deer's blood.
  
  It made me drunk, it was too red I thought.
  
  Life is so tiny little, and if it shoots
  Into the darkness without ever once flashing?
  
  "
  They turned back to the dome-top under the cloud.
  
  "You're tired, Helen.
  
  " "I'll not let the days of my life
  Hang like a string of naughts between two nothings.
  
  Wear a necklace of round zeros for pearls;
  I'm not made that way.
  
  Think what you please.
  
  Shall we go down
  now?
  
  "
  "The cloud has come all around us," he answered, seeing the distilled
  drops of the cloud like seed-pearls
  Hung in her hair and on the dark lashes.
  
  He turned to go down
  to the horses, she said "I have seen dawn with you,
  The red moonset and white dawn,
  And starlight on the mountain, and noon on burnt hills where
  there was no shadow but a vulture's, and that stag's blood:
  I've lived with you
  A long day like a lifetime, at last I've drawn something
  In the string of blanks.
  
  " She lifted her face against his shoulder
  and said "Good-bye.
  
  " He said "I'm Reave's friend,"
  And kissed her good-bye seeing she desired it, her breasts burrowed
  against him and friendship forgot his mind,
  With such brief wooing they stirred the deep wells of pleasure.
  
  She lay but half quieted, still hotly longing,
  Her eyes morbidly shuttered like the sleep of fever showed
  threads of the white and faint arcs of the crystalline
  Violet irises, barred across by the strong dark lashes; the night
  of the lids covered the pupils,
  Behind them, and under the thick brown hair and under the
  cunning sutures of the hollow bone the nerve-cells
  With locking fibrils made their own world and light, the multitude
  of small rayed animals of one descent.
  
  That make one mind, imagined a mountain
  Higher than the scope of nature, predominant over all these edges
  of the earth, on its head a sacrifice
  Half naked, all flaming, her hair blown like a fire through the
  level skies; for she had to believe this passion
  Not the wild heat of nature, but the superstitiously worshipped
  spirit of love, that is thought to burn
  All its acts righteous.
  
  While Helen adorned the deed with the
  dream it needed, her lover meanwhile
  Explored with hands and eyes the moulded smoothness through
  the open clothing, reviving his spent desire
  Until they were joined in longer-lasting delight; her nerve-cells
  intermitted their human dream;
  The happy automatism of life, inhuman as the sucking heart of
  the whirlwind, usurped the whole person,
  Aping pain, crying out and writhing like torture.
  
  They rose and
  went down to the horses;
  The light had changed in the sea-cloud, the sun must be near
  setting.
  
  When they were halfway down the mountain
  The whole cloud began to glow with color like a huge rose, a
  forest of transparent pale crimson petals
  Blowing all about them; slowly the glory
  Flared up the slope and faded in the high air.
  
  IV
  They rode
  through pale twilight
  And whispered at the farmhouse door inarticulate leave-takings.
  
  Helen went in; Armstrong unsaddled the horses
  Ahd walked heavily up canyon and crossed the hill.
  
  Helen said, "Reave went after a wounded deer
  And sent me home.
  
  He hasn't come home yet?
  
  "
  Reave's mother said "We've not seen him," steadily watching her
  Across the lamplight with eyes like an old hawk's,
  Red-brown and indomitable, and tired.
  
  But if she was hawk-like
  As Helen fancied, it was not in the snatching look
  But the alienation and tamelessness and sullied splendor
  Of a crippled hawk in a cage.
  
  She was worn at fifty
  To thin old age; the attritions of time and toil and arthritis
  That wear old women to likeness had whetted this one
  To difference, as if they had bitten on a bronze hawk
  Under the eroded flesh.
  
  Helen avoided her eyes
  And said to the other in the room, "Ah, Mark, you guessed right.
  
  I'm tired to death, must creep up to bed now.
  
  " The old woman:
  "So you came home alone?
  
  That young Armstrong
  Stayed with Reave.
  
  " Helen faltered an instant and said,
  "No, for Reave sent him with me, wishing his horse
  To be taken home.
  
  Mr.
  
  Armstrong stopped
  By the corral, he was unsaddling the horses I think,
  But I was too tired to help him.
  
  My rifle, Mark,
  Is clean: I minded your words.
  
  "
  An hour later the heavy tread
  of a man was heard on the steps
  And the fall of a fleshy bulk by the door, crossed by the click of
  hooves or antlers, and Reave came in,
  His shirt blood-stained on the breast and shoulders.
  
  "I got him,"
  he said.
  
  "It seemed for awhile I'd be out all night.
  
  By luck I found him, at twilight in a buckeye bush.
  
  Where's
  Helen, gone to bed?
  
  " "She seemed flurried with thoughts,"
  His mother answered, and going to the door that led to the
  kitchen she called, "Olvidia,"
  Bring in the supper.
  
  " "Well, yes," Reave said.
  
  "I must first hang
  up the carcass and wash my hands.
  
  " "Olvidia,"
  His mother called to the kitchen, "will you tell Johnny: is Johnny
  there?
  
  Tell him to fetch the meat
  From the door-step and hang it up with the other.
  
  " Mark said,
  "How far, Reave, did you carry it?
  
  " "Two miles or so.
  
  Rough country at first; I held it in front of me to butt the brush
  with.
  
  " "Why, what does it weigh?
  
  " "Oh," he said, "a young
  buck.
  
  About Helen's weight.
  
  " "You are strong," his mother said, "that's
  good: but a fool.
  
  " "Well, mother, I might have hung it
  In a tree and gone up with a horse to-morrow; I shouldered it
  to save time.
  
  "
  Mark, enviously:
  "You've seen many green canyons and the clouds on a hundred
  hills.
  
  My mind has better mountains than these in it,
  And bloodless ones.
  
  " The dark Spanish-Indian woman
  Olvidia took Reave's empty plate and the dish,
  And Mrs.
  
  Thurso said, "Reave, you've big arms,
  And ribs like a rain-barrel, what do they amount to
  If the mind inside is a baby?
  
  Our white-face bull's
  Bigger and wiser.
  
  " "What have I done?
  
  " "I'll never say
  Your young Helen's worth keeping, but while you have her
  Don't turn her out to pasture on the mountain
  With the yellow-haired young man.
  
  Those heavy blue eyes
  Came home all enriched.
  
  " Reave laughed and Mark said bitterly,
  "Mother, that's mean.
  
  You know her too well for that.
  
  Helen is as clear as the crystal
  sky, don't breathe on her.
  
  " "You," she answered fondly.
  
  Reave smiled, "I trust Rick Armstrong as I do my own hand.
  
  "
  "It shames my time of life,"
  She answered, "to have milky-new sons.
  
  What has he done for you
  To be your angel?
  
  " "Why," he said, "I like him.
  
  " "That's generous,
  And rare in you.
  
  How old is he?
  
  " "My age.
  
  Twenty-four.
  
  "
  "Oh, that's a better reason to trust him.
  
  " "Hm?
  
  " "You're the
  same age.
  
  "
  "That's no reason.
  
  " "No," she answered.
  
  V
  Toward noon the next day
  Helen was ironing linen by the kitchen stove,
  A gun-shot was heard quite near the house, she dropped the iron
  And ran outdoors and met Mark.
  
  "What was that shot?
  
  " "Don't
  go up there, Helen.
  
  " "Why not, why not," she stammered,
  "Why not," the flush of the stove-heat graying on her cheek.
  
  "Reave has put poor old Bones out of pain.
  
  " "Oh, that!"
  Laughing and trembling, "Your funeral face.
  
  I thought something
  had happened to someone.
  
  Let the old dog sleep.
  
  "
  She went up hill to the screen of seawind-stunted laurel and oak,
  where Reave was already spading
  Dust into the gape of a small grave.
  
  "You've done for poor old
  Bones, have you?
  
  You knew I loved him,
  So you took him off.
  
  " "A pity you came just now, Helen.
  
  He
  died in a moment.
  
  If we'd used this mercy
  Two or three months ago we'd have saved pain.
  
  " She answered,
  quivering with anger, "You do it on the sly
  And call it mercy.
  
  Ah, killing's your pleasure, your secret vice.
  
  "
  "I'll wish you sunnier pleasures: and a little
  Sense in your head: he was made of miseries: you've seen him plead
  To be helped, and wonder at us when the pain stayed.
  
  I've helped him now.
  
  " "Will you do as much for yourself
  When life dirties and darkens?
  
  Your father did.
  
  "
  "No, I will not," he said, shovelling the dust.
  
  "What's that said for?
  
  For spite?
  
  " "No, Reave.
  
  I was wondering.
  
  For I think it's reasonable.
  
  When the flower and fruit are gone, nothing but sour rind,
  Why suck the shell?
  
  I think your father was right.
  
  "
  "Drop a little silence on him," Reave answered.
  
  "We may help out the beasts, but a man mustn't be beaten.
  
  That was a little too easy, to pop himself off because he went broke.
  
  I was ten years old, I tried not to despise the soft stuff
  That ran away to the dark from a touch of trouble:
  Because the lime-kilns failed and the lumber mill
  Ran out of redwood.
  
  My mother took up his ruins and made a farm;
  She wouldn't run away, to death or charity.
  
  Mark and I helped.
  
  We lost most of the land but we saved enough.
  
  "
  "Think of one man owning so many canyons:
  Sovranes, Granite," she counted on her fingers, "Garapatas, Palo
  Colorado,
  Rocky Creek, and this Mill Creek.
  
  " "Oh, that was nothing, the
  land was worth nothing
  In those days, only for lime and redwood.
  
  " She answered,
  "You needn't despise him, Reave.
  
  My dad never owned anything.
  
  While I worked in a laundry and while I crated fruit
  He ate my wages and lived as long as he could
  And died crying.
  
  " "We're proud of our fathers, hm?
  
  Well, he was sick a long time," Reave said, patting
  The back of the spade on the filled grave; "but courage might live
  While the lungs rot.
  
  I think it might.
  
  You never
  Saw him again, did you?
  
  " "How saw him?
  
  " "We used to see mine
  Often in the evenings.
  
  " "What do you mean, Reave?
  
  "
  "Why: in the evenings.
  
  Coming back to stare at his unfinished things.
  
  Mother still often sees him.
  
  " Helen's face brightening
  With happy interest, "Oh where?
  
  " she said.
  
  "On the paths;
  Looking up at that thing, with his mouth open.
  
  "
  Reave waved his hand toward the great brown iron skip
  Hanging on its cable in the canyon sky,
  That used to carry the lime from the hill, but now
  Stuck on dead pulleys in the sky.
  
  "It ought to be taken down
  Before it falls.
  
  I’ll do it when we've done the plowing.
  
  "
  Helen said, "Does he ever speak?
  
  " "Too ashamed of himself.
  
  I spoke to him once:
  I was carrying firewood into the house, my arms were full.
  
  He
  worked a smile on his face and pointed
  At the trolley up there.
  
  " "Do you really believe," she said, "that
  your father's ghost?
  
  " "Certainly not.
  
  Some stain
  Stagnates here in the hollow canyon air, or sticks in our minds.
  
  How could too weak to live
  Show after it died?
  
  " "I knew," she answered, blanching again
  with capricious anger, "you'd no mercy in you,
  But only sudden judgment for any weak thing;
  And neither loving nor passionate; dull, cold and scornful.
  
  I used
  to keep a gay heart in my worst days
  And laugh a little: how can I live
  Where nothing except poor Mark is even half human, you like
  a stone, hard and joyless, dark inside,
  And your mother like an old hawk, and even dirty Olvidia and
  Johnny Luna, dark and hollow
  As the hearts of jugs.
  
  The dog here in the ground Oh but how
  carefully you scrape the blood-lake
  Had loving brown eyes: so you killed him: he was sometimes
  joyful: it wouldn't do.
  
  You killed him for that.
  
  " He answered,
  Staring, "Were you born a fool?
  
  What's the matter, Helen?
  
  "
  "If I had to stay here
  I'd turn stone too: cold and dark: I'd give a dollar
  For a mirror now, and show you that square face of yours
  Taken to pieces with amazement: you never guessed
  Helen's a shrew.
  
  Oh, what do you want her for?
  
  Let her go.
  
  " She left him; and when he came in at noon
  Spoke meekly, she seemed to have wept.
  
  VI
  In the evening, in
  Helen's presence,
  Reave's mother said, "Did that sand-haired young man
  Find you, Reave, when he came this afternoon?
  
  He didn't come to the house.
  
  " "Who?
  
  " "That road-worker,
  Arnfield.
  
  " "Rick Armstrong?
  
  " "Most likely: the one I warned you
  Not to pasture your heifer with.
  
  " "He was here?
  
  " "No,
  Not here.
  
  I saw him come down the hill, and Helen
  Went out to meet him.
  
  " Mark Thurso looked up
  From the book he'd been reading, and watched his mother
  As a pigeon on a rock watches a falcon quartering
  The field beyond the next fence; but Helen suddenly:
  "Now listen, Mark.
  
  I'm to be framed, ah?
  
  I think so.
  
  I never liked her.
  
  " The old woman said,
  "Did you say something?
  
  " "Not yet," she answered.
  
  Reave made
  a mocking
  Noise in his throat and said, "Let them alone.
  
  No peace between women.
  
  This morning I sent Luna over the hill
  With one of the bucks we killed, no doubt my friend came over
  At quitting-time to say thank-you: why he didn't find me's
  Less clear, but watch the women build it between them
  To a big darkness.
  
  " "Not I," Helen said,
  And dipped her needle two or three careful stitches
  In the cloth she was mending, then looked up suddenly
  To see who watched her.
  
  "If I'd seen him," she said, "I'd have
  spoken to him.
  
  I am not sick with jealousy of your new friend.
  
  But he was
  probably not here; the old eyes that make
  A dead man's phantom can imagine a live one's.
  
  " The old woman:
  "When you saw him you ran to meet him; I sent Olvidia
  To see if the speckled hen had stolen a nest in the willows.
  
  She
  walked down there, what she saw amazed her.
  
  I've not allowed her to tell me though she bubbles with it.
  
  Your
  business, Reave: ask her.
  
  Not mine: I'm only
  The slow man's mother.
  
  " Helen stood up, trembling a little and
  smiling, she held the needle and the spool
  And folded the cloth, saying "Your mother, Reave,
  Loves you well: too well: you and I honor her for that.
  
  She has
  hated me from the day she heard of me,
  But that was jealousy, the shadow that shows love's real: nothing
  to resent.
  
  But now you seem very friendly
  With that young man too: she can't bear to yield you again, it
  cracks the string of her mind.
  
  No one can fancy
  What she's plotted with the kitchen woman .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Mark Thurso
  said with lips that suddenly whitened: "7 met Armstrong.
  
  I told him you'd ridden up the high pasture, for so I believed.
  
  He asked me to thank you warmly
  For the buck you sent: I forgot to tell you.
  
  I was with him while
  he was here, and when he went back I hobbled
  Some ways up hill.
  
  " The old woman moved her lips but said
  nothing; but Reave: "Here: what's the matter,
  Brother?
  
  You were with me constantly all afternoon.
  
  " "But an
  hour," Mark said.
  
  "Hm?
  
  Five minutes.
  
  " Then Helen,
  Looking from the one to the other: "If I am hated, I think I am
  loved too.
  
  I'd something to say .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh: yes: will you promise, Reave, promise Olvidia
  You'll give her, for telling the perfect truth, whatever your
  mother has promised her for telling lies: then I'm safe.
  
  Call her and ask her.
  
  " He answered, "She'll sleep in hell first.
  
  Here's enough stories
  Without hers in the egg-basket.
  
  Do you think it was Armstrong
  you saw, mother?
  
  I trust Rick Armstrong
  From the bright point to the handle.
  
  " Helen said, "Ah, Mark,
  You'd never imagine I'd be satisfied with that.
  
  I have to be satisfied with that.
  
  " "Why not?
  
  " Reave said.
  
  And she: "If it was nothing worse than killing to fear
  I'd confess.
  
  All kinds of lies.
  
  I fear you so much
  I'd confess .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  all kinds of lies .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  to get it over with,"
  She said, making a clicking noise in her throat
  Like one who has drunk too much and hiccoughs, "only
  To get it over with: only, I haven't done anything.
  
  This terror, Mark, has no reason,
  Reave never struck nor threatened me, yet well I know
  That while I've lived here I've always been sick with fear
  As that woman is with jealousy.
  
  Deep in me, a black lake
  His eyes drill to, it spurts.
  
  Sometime he'll drill to my heart
  And that's the nut of courage hidden in the lake.
  
  Then we'll see.
  
  I don't mean anything bad, you know: I'm very
  innocent,
  And wish to think high, like Mark.
  
  Olvidia of course is a hollow
  liar.
  
  May I go now?
  
  I'm trembling-tired:
  If you'll allow me to go up to bed?
  
  But indeed I dare not
  While you sit judging.
  
  " She looked at Mark and slightly
  Reached both her hands toward him, smiled and went out.
  
  But in the little dark hallway under the stair,
  When she hastened through it in the sudden darkness,
  The door being neither open nor shut passed edgewise
  Between her two groping hands, her cheek and brow
  Struck hard on the edge.
  
  Her moan was heard in the room of
  lamplight;
  Where they had been sitting silent while she went out,
  An4 when she had gone Mark Thurso had said, "Mother:
  You've done an infamous thing.
  
  " "They might play Jack and queen
  All they please," she answered, "but not my son
  For the fool card in the deck," the shock of struck wood was heard,
  And Helen's hushed groan: Mark, dragging his lameness, reeled
  Swiftly across the room saying "What has she done?
  
  "
  He groped in the passage and spoke tenderly, then Reave
  Went and brought Helen to the lamplight; a little blood
  Ran through her left eye to her lips from the cut eyebrow.
  
  The implacable old woman said "She's not hurt.
  
  Will you make a fuss?
  
  " Helen said, "The wood of your house
  Is like your mother, Reave, hits in the dark.
  
  This will wash off.
  
  " She went to the kitchen and met
  Olvidia who'd been listening against the door,
  Then Helen, moaning "I'm ringed with my enemies," turned
  To flee, and turned back.
  
  "I will take it now.
  
  My husband, Olvidia,
  Is ready to kill me, you see.
  
  I have been kind to you
  Two or three times.
  
  Have you seen any unusual
  Or wicked meeting to-day?
  
  " The Indian woman,
  Dreading Reave's anger and seeing the blood, but hardly
  Understanding the words, blanked her dark face
  And wagged her head.
  
  "Don't know.
  
  What you mean, wicked?
  
  I better keep out of this.
  
  " "A dish of water, Olvidia.
  
  Be near me, Mark.
  
  Reave: will you ask her now?
  
  "
  He said "Wash and be quiet.
  
  " Helen said, "Oh Olvidia,
  Someone has made him angry at you and me.
  
  Look in my eyes.
  
  Tell no bad stories .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  lies, that is .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Did you see anything when you looked for eggs
  In the willows along the creek?
  
  " Olvidia folded
  Her lips together and stepped backward, then Helen
  Sighed, dabbling her cheek with water.
  
  "It hurts.
  
  I think
  It will turn black.
  
  " Reave suddenly shouted "Answer.
  
  "
  Olvidia, retreating farther: "What you want of me?
  
  I find no eggs.
  
  " Mark said, "Come, Helen, Oh come.
  
  I've watched
  innocence tormented
  And can no more.
  
  Go up and sleep if you can, I'll speak for you,
  to-morrow all this black cloud of wrong
  Will be melted quite away in the morning.
  
  " Reave said, "Don't
  fawn on her, you make me mad.
  
  Women will do it.
  
  But why praise 'em for it?
  
  " Helen, meekly: "I am very tired and
  helpless and driven to the edge.
  
  Think kindly of me,
  Mark, I believe I shall be much hated.
  
  Your mother .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  This is all.
  
  Light me a candle.
  
  " At the foot of the stair
  She closed the door, and silently tip-toed through
  The passage and the other room to the door of the house,
  There pinched the wick, and praying for no wind
  To make a stir in the house, carefully opened
  The outer door and latched it behind her.
  
  She traversed the hill,
  And at the road-men's camp, plucking at the fly
  Of a lit tent, thought momently it was curious
  She stood among so many unrestrained men
  Without fear, yet feared Reave.
  
  "I must see Rick Armstrong
  This moment: which tent?
  
  " They laid their hands of cards
  Carefully face down on the packing-box.
  
  "Why, ma'am, I can't say exactly," but she had run off
  To another lamp of shining canvas and found him.
  
  "Let me stand into the light.
  
  " She showed her cut brow
  A little bleeding again with hurry in the dark,
  And the purpling bruise.
  
  "What Reave did.
  
  Your friend Reave.
  
  His mother spied and told on us.
  
  What will you do?
  
  "
  "By God!" "Oh," she said, "that's no good.
  
  How could you keep me here?
  
  Borrow a car,
  There are cars here.
  
  " He said "I'll take care of you.
  
  " She
  shuddered,
  Beating her fists together, breathed long and said:
  "If you choose to stand here and talk among the men listening
  It is not my fault.
  
  I say if you and these men could stop him when
  he comes
  You can'tto-night, to-night, in an hour nothing can stop him:
  he'd call the sheriff to-morrow and have me
  Like a stolen cow, nothing but ridiculous, a mark for children to
  hoot at, crying in my hair, probably
  Led on a rope.
  
  Don't you know him?
  
  I do.
  
  Oh my lover
  Take me to the worst hut at the world's end and kill me there,
  but take me from here before Reave comes.
  
  I'd go so gladly.
  
  And how could you bear to face him, he thought
  you his faithful friend, for shame even?
  
  Oh hurry, hurry!"
  VII
  In the desert at the foot of sun-rotted hills
  A row of wooden cabins flanks a gaunt building
  Squatted on marbly terraces of its own excrement,
  Digested rock from which the metal has been sucked,
  Drying in the rage of the sun.
  
  Reave Thurso stopped
  At the first cabin, a woman came out and pointed;
  He went to the farthest cabin, knocked, and went in.
  
  "Well, Helen.
  
  You found a real sunny place.
  
  " Opening the door
  She'd been a violet-eyed girl, a little slatternly
  But rich with life; she stood back from the door
  Sallow, with pinched nostrils and dwindled eyes,
  As if she had lost a fountain of blood, and faintly
  Whispering "I knew you.
  
  " Reave looked about him like one
  Attentively learning the place, and Helen said
  "I never hoped that you wouldn't come at last,
  It seemed a kind of blood-trail for you to follow.
  
  And then I knew you were tardy and cold of course and at last
  You'd come at last, you never give up anything,
  How did you track us at last?
  
  " "Oh," he laughed, "Time and I.
  
  He's at work?
  
  " "Yes.
  
  " "If you wanted to hide
  You'd have got him to change his name.
  
  " "I begged him to," she
  answered,
  Suddenly weeping, "so many times.
  
  " "Don't cry, don't cry.
  
  You know that I'll never hurt you.
  
  Mark loves you too, he's been
  very lonely.
  
  He wanted me to let you go,
  But that was nonsense.
  
  He's been sick since you went away.
  
  Do
  you remember the rose-bush you made me buy
  That time in Salinas?
  
  Mark's watered it for you, sick or well,
  Every day, limping around the house with a pail of water spilling
  on his poor ankle-joint,
  He'll be glad to see you again.
  
  Well, pack your things.
  
  " She gathered
  Her blanked face to some show of life.
  
  "Look around at this
  country.
  
  Oh Reave.
  
  Reave.
  
  Look.
  
  I let him
  Take me here at last.
  
  And he hasn't been always perfectly kind:
  but since I’ve been living with him I love him .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  My heart would break if I tried to tell you how much.
  
  I'm not
  ashamed.
  
  There was something in me that didn't
  Know about love until I was living with him.
  
  I kissed him, when
  he went back to work this noon.
  
  I didn't know you were corning; forgot you were coming sometime.
  
  See how it is.
  
  No: I understand:
  You won't take me.
  
  " He, astonished: "Not take you?
  
  After hunting
  you a whole year?
  
  You dream too much, Helen.
  
  It makes you lovely in a way, but it clouds your mind.
  
  You must
  distinguish.
  
  All this misfortune of yours
  Probably .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "Oh God," she said, shuddering,
  "Will you preach too?
  
  First listen to me: I tell you all the other
  joys I’ve ever known in my life
  Were dust to this .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  misfortune; the desert sun out there is a
  crow's wing against the brightness of this .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Misfortune: Oh I didn't mean, dear,
  To make you angry.
  
  " She was suddenly kneeling to him and
  pressed her face
  On his hard thigh: "I know Pve been wicked, Reave.
  
  You must leave me in the dirt for a bad woman: the women here
  See the marks of it, look sidelings at me.
  
  I'll still believe you used to love me a little,
  But now of course
  You wouldn't want for a wife .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  a handkerchief
  You lost and another man picked me up and
  Wiped his mouth.
  
  Oh there may have been many
  Other men.
  
  In a year: you can't tell.
  
  Your mother is strong and always rightly despised me.
  
  She'd spit on me if she saw me now.
  
  So now
  You'll simply cast me off; you're strong, like your mother,
  And when you see that a thing's perfectly worthless
  You can pick it out of your thoughts.
  
  Don't forgive me.
  
  I only
  Pray you to hate me.
  
  Say 'She's no good.
  
  To hell with her!
  That's the mercy I pray you for.
  
  " He said hastily, "Get up,
  This is no theater.
  
  I intend to take you back, Helen,
  I never was very angry at you, remembering
  That a.
  
  woman's more like a child, besides you were muddled
  With imaginations and foolish reading.
  
  So we'll shut this bad year
  In a box of silence and drown it out of our minds.
  
  " She stood
  away from him toward the farther wall
  With a sharp white face, like a knife-blade worn thin and hollow
  with too much whetting, and said, turning her face
  Toward the window, "How do I know that he can compel me?
  
  He can torment us, but there's no law
  To give me to him.
  
  You can't take me against my will.
  
  No: I
  won't go.
  
  Do you think you're God,
  And we have to do what you want?
  
  " He said, "You'll go all
  right.
  
  " She, laughing, "At last you've struck something
  Stiffer than you.
  
  Reave, that stubborn will
  Is not strength but disease, I've always known it, like the slow
  limy sickness
  You hear about, that turns a man's flesh to bone,
  The willing muscles and fibers little by little
  Grow hard and helpless, at last you can't dent them, nothing will move,
  He lands in a tent beside the circus, with a painting of him
  Over the door and people pay ten cents
  To see the petrified man: that's your stubbornness,
  Your mind sets and can't change, you don't go on
  Because you want to but because you have to, I pity you,
  But here you're stopped.
  
  " Suddenly she trembled and shrank
  little again.
  
  "7f you could take me
  I'd stab you in bed sleeping.
  
  " "You know," he answered,
  "You're talking foolishness.
  
  I have to see Armstrong before we go,
  When he quits work, I guess there's a couple of hours, but you'd
  best get ready.
  
  " "Why must you see .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Rick?
  
  "
  Reave made no answer, Helen covertly watched him, slowly the
  metal temper failed from her face.
  
  "I'll go," she said faintly, "and tell him.
  
  " "You'll stay here.
  
  " "Reave?
  
  Reave.
  
  You said you weren't angry.
  
  " "Not at you.
  
  If I'd anyone
  To help me, I'd send you off first.
  
  Walked around like a man,
  Was a male bitch .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "I led him, I called him, I did it.
  
  It's all mine.
  
  " "What?
  
  " "The blame, the blame, the blame,
  I planned it, all mine, I did it, Reave.
  
  " A white speck glittered
  At the commissure of his lips, he licked his lips
  As if he were thirsty and said difficultly, "I've had a
  Year to think about it: have to have relief, you're
  Let off, keep still.
  
  " She felt his eyes
  Craftily avoiding hers, and something monstrous in him moulding
  the mass of his body to a coarsened
  More apelike form, that a moment appeared and then was
  cramped back to human: her image-making mind beheld
  Her lover go under the hammers of this coarse power, his face
  running thick blood turn up at last
  Like a drowning man's, before he went down the darkness, all his
  gay bravery crushed made horrible submission:
  With any warning or whatever weapons he'd be like a bird in a
  dog's mouth, Reave had all the strength,
  Would fight foul, with all means and no mercy: "Oh, Oh, take
  me with you
  If you want me, but now.
  
  Before he comes.
  
  How could I look at him again if I'm going to leave him?
  
  You
  understand
  That's too much to ask me, to stand between you
  Like a cow between the brown bull and the white one.
  
  In spite of all I'm not so .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  shameless as .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You think.
  
  " He made a questioning noise, "Hm?
  
  " and she thinking
  He'd failed to hear: "I'll go and live with you
  If you'll take me now.
  
  I can't face Rick, not wait for Rick,"
  She said, weaving and parting the fingers
  Of her two supplicant hands.
  
  She essayed more words,
  But only the lips and no voice made them, then again
  Breath filled the words, "I've done wickedly, I'm sorry.
  
  I will obey you now.
  
  " His eyes were hidden
  While he considered, all at once he said joyfully
  "Pack then.
  
  " "Me, not my things: there's nothing.
  
  " "Then come.
  
  "
  She followed him; suddenly in the doorway she dropped
  And kissed the threshold.
  
  Thurso watched and said nothing;
  She got up and walked at his side in the hot white dust by the
  row of small cabins,
  The wood of their doors and walls was worn to the look of seadrift
  by the desert sand-scour.
  
  Suddenly Helen
  Laughed like the bitter crying of a killdeer when someone walks
  near the nest, "My God, Reave, have you come for me
  In the old wreck of a farm-truck, will it still run?
  
  " "What else?
  
  We haven't got rich, we haven't bought cars
  While I've been away from home hunting you.
  
  " "The pigs and
  I," she cried shrilly.
  
  Reave nodded, and went to the door
  Of the last cabin, and said to the woman to whom he had spoken
  before: "I'm taking my wife home.
  
  This woman's my wife.
  
  When Armstrong comes, tell that bastard
  We're going west.
  
  He's got a car.
  
  " Helen cried, "Oh, cheat, cheat,
  Will you tole him after you?
  
  " He said heavily.
  
  "What do you mean?
  
  Come on," and so holding her wrist that the bones ached
  Drew her to the car.
  
  She had yielded and was subject to him,
  She could imagine no recourse, her mind palsied
  Like the wrist-clenched hand.
  
  VIII
  After twenty miles he turned
  The carbureter-connection, slyly regarding
  His seat-mate, she fogged with misery observed nothing.
  
  The engine went lame, "What's the matter?
  
  " he said, turning
  The carbureter-connection; the engine stalled.
  
  He lifted the hood and made the motions of helplessness,
  Looking up sometimes at Helen, who sat in the dust on the high
  seat on the folded blanket,
  Her face in her hands.
  
  "We're stuck here," Thurso said.
  
  "Well,
  we have water.
  
  " She dropped her hands from her face
  And stared at the road ahead; then she began to see the desert
  about them, the unending incandescent
  Plain of white dust, stippled with exact placing of small gray
  plants, each tuft a painfully measured
  Far distance from every other and so apparently forever, all
  wavering under the rage of the sun,
  A perfect arena for the man's cruelty; but now she was helpless.
  
  Still Armstrong failed to come; Helen awoke again
  From blind misery, and watched Reave's nerves
  Growing brittle while the sun sailed west.
  
  He babbled childlike
  About cattle and pastures, things unreal, unimaginable,
  In the white anguish here; his hands quivered,
  And the sun sank.
  
  In the night Helen revived
  Enough to make action appear possible again.
  
  She crept stealthily away in the starry darkness
  Thinking Reave slept; when he spoke she tried to run,
  Her thighs and calves were like hollow water, he followed
  And brought her back through the vast unnatural pallor of the night,
  Rough-handed, but only saying "You're too restless.
  
  " She writhed
  her hands together like bitter flames and lay down
  On the spread blanket.
  
  After while she lay face upward.
  
  Those
  foam-bubbles on the stale water of night
  Were floating stars, what did it matter, which of two men?
  
  Yesterday the one had been lovely and the other
  Came in like ugly death, but difference had died.
  
  Rick Armstrong
  must have made some ridiculous plan
  For heading them off or else he'd have come.
  
  Perhaps he thought
  she went willingly.
  
  Why not?
  
  "I go with you willingly,"
  She said aloud, "dear, do you hear me?
  
  I've shot my load of
  feeling, there's nothing left in the world
  Worth thinking twice.
  
  We'll crawl home to our hole.
  
  "
  He answered, "I can't believe he's a coward: he'll come in the
  morning.
  
  " "I dread death
  More than your mother's eyes," she answered.
  
  "I'm the coward
  or I'd kill myself.
  
  Dear, I fear death
  More than I hate this dishwater broth of life.
  
  A bowlful a day, O
  God! Do the stars look
  Like lonely and pretty sparkles when you look up?
  
  They look to me like bubbles of grease on cold
  Dishwater.
  
  " He said, "Sleep, you’ll feel better.
  
  " He heard her
  sighing
  And twisting her body on the sand while the night waned.
  
  He got up and stood beside her and said anxiously,
  "I was to blame too, Helen.
  
  Part of the blame
  Is mine, Helen.
  
  I didn't show enough love,
  Nor do often enough
  What women want.
  
  Maybe it made your life
  Seem empty.
  
  It seems .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  it seems to me it wouldn't be decent
  To do it just now: but I'll remember and be
  Better when we get home.
  
  " She said, "O God! Fool, fool,
  A spoonful a night.
  
  Your mother was lying to you.
  
  She knows better.
  
  "
  In the morning
  Thurso waited two hours from sunrise;
  They had nothing to eat; Helen endured her headache, and the
  shameless sun
  Blared from the east.
  
  Reave greased the joints of the truck.
  
  When one of those long gray desert lizards that run
  With heads raised highly, scudded through the white sand,
  He flung the wrench suddenly and broke its back
  And said "He won't come then.
  
  My God, Helen,
  Was he tired of you?
  
  He won't come.
  
  " She watched her husband
  Pick up the wrench and batter that broken life,
  Still lifting up its head at him, into the sand.
  
  He saw the yellow
  Grains of fat in the red flesh and said,
  "Come here, Helen.
  
  Yellow you see, yellow you see.
  
  Your friend makes us all vile.
  
  " She understood
  That "yellow" meant cowardly, and that this was Armstrong
  Battered to a cake of blood.
  
  IX
  They drove west
  Through the white land; the heat and the light increased,
  At length around a ridge of ancient black lava
  Appeared a place of dust where food could be bought, but Helen
  Would eat nothing.
  
  In the evening they came
  293
  THURSO'S LANDING
  Among fantastic Joshua-trees to a neat
  Framed square of cabins at the foot of a mountain
  Like a skeleton; seeing Helen so white and sick,
  And the motor misfiring, Reave chose to lodge at this camp.
  
  He'd tinker the engine while there was daylight.
  
  He found the timer
  Choked up with drift of the desert; having washed it with gasoline
  and heard the cylinders
  Roar cheerfully again, he returned to Helen.
  
  She was not in the cabin,
  But sat with chance companions on a painted bench under the
  boughs of one of those reptilian trees
  Near the camp entrance; no longer white and morose, her face
  was flushed, her eyes sparkling with darkness
  In the purple evening that washed the mountain.
  
  Before he came
  she was saying, "My husband just doesn't care
  What anyone thinks: he said, all right, if I wanted to see the
  desert, but he wouldn't take either one
  Of our new cars to be spoiled, he'd drive the old farmtruck .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  Seeing Reave approaching, greased black to the elbows, "Oh, Oh,
  What's he been doing?
  
  Oh: it's black, I think?
  
  Dear, I felt better
  When the sun went down.
  
  " He, staring at her companions:
  "That's good.
  
  " "They call it desert fever," she stammered.
  
  "The heat's the cause.
  
  " She stood up, giggling and swaying.
  
  "Was nearly exhausted, they gave me a little medicine.
  
  Nice people.
  
  " "What did you give her?
  
  " "She begged for a tablespoonful,"
  the old woman answered, "Texas corn-whiskey.
  
  Are you going west?
  
  " Helen said gravely, "A spoonful a night:
  O God!" "She's eaten nothing," Reave said,
  "Since yesterday.
  
  Come and lie down, Helen.
  
  " She obeyed, walking
  unsteadily beside him, with terrified eyes.
  
  "Dear, please don't touch me, your hands are terrible," she said.
  
  "They think you killed him.
  
  "
  He made her lie down on the bed while he washed himself.
  
  She wept and said, "I always make friends easily.
  
  I used to be full of joy.
  
  Now my wishes
  Or your own soul will destroy you when you get home.
  
  I'd give my life to save you.
  
  " He groaned angrily,
  But she was unable to be silent and said:
  "I think you're even worse hurt than I am.
  
  Were you ever on a ship?
  
  This place is like a ship, everything smells
  In spite of neatness, and I am desert-sick.
  
  Oh, Reave, I never dreamed that you'd be deep-wounded.
  
  Forgive me dear.
  
  " He violently: "Lick your own sores.
  
  The man was my friend and that degrades me: but you’ve
  Slept with him.
  
  You couldn't help but have learned him
  In a year's familiar life and I've been thinking
  That whores you, because no woman can love a coward,
  And still you stayed .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "For his money, for his money you know,"
  She answered through chattering teeth, "and the fine house
  You found me in among the rich gardens, the jewels and furs,
  Necklaces of pearls like round zeroes, all these hangings of gold
  That make me heavy .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "Ah," he said, "be quiet.
  
  " He went
  out, and returning after a time with a tray of food
  Lighted the lamp and cut meat in small bites and forced her to
  eat.
  
  "Dear," she mourned, "I can't swallow
  Though I chew and chew.
  
  The rocking of the ship and the hot
  smell close up my throat.
  
  Oh be patient with me.
  
  When we land I'll feel better," her deep-colored eyes moving in
  sickly rhythm to the roll of the ship,
  He said "You're in the desert: an auto-camp by the road.
  
  Wake
  up and eat.
  
  " She sat up on the bed
  And looked anxiously about the bleak lamplight, then took the tray
  And obeyed his will.
  
  "I thought you were my dad.
  
  Once we travelled on a boat from the south
  To San Francisco.
  
  I expect I saw from the deck the Mill Creek
  mountains and never
  Guessed," she said, shuddering.
  
  While she ate she began to fear
  That people who were going to die dreamed of a ship
  The night before.
  
  The truck would be overturned
  And crush her body in the sand like that lizard's,
  A tire would have burst.
  
  Against the black horror of death
  All living miseries looked sweet; in a moment of aimless
  Wild anguish she was unable not to cry out, and said:
  "Ah, Ah, what have you done, tearing me from him?
  
  I love him,
  you know.
  
  Maybe he's cowardly or maybe he's only tired of me, but if he's
  yellow to the bones, if he's yellower than gold,
  I love him, you know.
  
  If I were crushed in the sand like that lizard you killed, to a cake
  of blood why not?
  
  for I think you'll
  Do it sometime the sun would dry me and my dust would blow
  to his feet: if I were dead in the desert
  And he drowned in the middle ocean toward Asia, yet something
  and something from us would climb like white
  Fires up the sky and twine high shining wings in the hollow sky:
  while you in your grave lie stuck
  Like a stone in a ditch.
  
  " He, frowning: "Have you finished?
  
  "
  He took the tray and said, "Have you had enough?
  
  "
  "Never enough.
  
  Dear, give me back to him.
  
  I can't think yet
  That you understand," she said slyly and trembling.
  
  "Don't you care, that he and I have made love together
  In the mountains and in the city and in the desert,
  And once at a Navajo shepherd's camp in the desert in a storm of
  lightnings
  Playing through the cracks of the shed: can you wink and
  swallow
  All that?
  
  " "I can't help it.
  
  You've played the beast.
  
  But you are my goods and you'll be guarded, your filthy time
  Has closed.
  
  Now keep still.
  
  "
  She was silent and restless for a good while.
  
  He said, "You'll be sleeping soon, and you need sleep.
  
  I'll go outside while you get ready for bed.
  
  "
  "Let me speak, just a little," she said humbly.
  
  "Please, Reave, won't you leave me here in the morning, I'll
  manage somehow.
  
  You're too strong for us, but, dear, be merciful.
  
  I think you don't greatly want me: what you love really
  Is something to track down: your mountains are full of deer:
  Oh, hunt some bleeding doe.
  
  I truly love you.
  
  I always thought of you as a dear, dear friend
  When even we were hiding from you.
  
  " He was astonished
  To see her undress while she was speaking to him,
  She seemed to regard him as a mere object, a keeper,
  But nothing human.
  
  "And Rick Armstrong," she said,
  "I can't be sure that I love him: dear, I don't know
  That I'll go back to him; but I must have freedom, I must have
  freedom
  If only to die in, it comes too late .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  She turned her back and slipped off the undergarment
  And glided into the bed.
  
  She was beautiful still,
  The smooth fluted back and lovely long tapering legs not
  changed,
  Nor the supple motions; nor that recklessness
  Of what Thurso called modesty was any change;
  She never tried to conceal her body from him
  Since they were married, but always thoughtless and natural;
  And nestled her head in the pillow when she lay down
  With little nods, the tender way he remembered:
  So that a wave of compassionate love
  Dissolved his heart: he thought, "Dearest, I've done
  Brutally: I'll not keep you against your will.
  
  But you must promise to write to me for help
  When you leave that cur.
  
  " He made the words in his mind
  And began to say: "Dearest .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " but nothing further
  Had meaning in it, mere jargon of mutterings, the mouth's refusal
  Of the mind's surrender; and his mind flung up a memory
  Of that poor dead man, his father, with the sad beaten face
  When the lime-kilns failed: that man yielded and was beaten,
  A man mustn't be beaten.
  
  But Helen hearing
  The "dearest," and the changed voice, wishfully
  Lifted her head, and the great violet eyes
  Sucked at Reave's face.
  
  "No," he said.
  
  He blew out the lamp,
  Resolved to make this night a new marriage night
  And undo their separation.
  
  She bitterly submitted;
  "I can bear this: it doesn't matter: I'll never tell him.
  
  I feel the ship sailing to a bad place.
  
  Reave, I'm so tired
  That I shall die.
  
  If my wrist were broken
  You wouldn't take my hand and arm in your hands
  And wriggle the bones for pleasure?
  
  You're doing that
  With a worse wound.
  
  " Her mind had many layers;
  The vocal one was busy with anguish, and others
  Finding a satisfaction in martyrdom
  Enjoyed its outcry; the mass of her mind
  Remained apparently quite neutral, under a familiar
  Embrace without sting, without savor, without significance,
  Except that this breast was hairier.
  
  X
  They drove through the two
  deserts and arrived home.
  
  Helen went in
  With whetted nerves for the war with Reave's mother, resolving
  Not to be humble at least; but instead of the sharp old woman a
  little creature
  With yellow hair and pleated excess of clothing stood up in the
  room; and blushed and whitened, anxiously
  Gazing, clasping thin hands together.
  
  Reave said, "It's Hester
  Clark.
  
  " And to Hester Clark: "Tell Olvidia
  To count two more for supper; my wife and I have come home.
  
  "
  She answered, "Oh yes," fleeing.
  
  Then Helen:
  "What's this little thing?
  
  Why does it wear my dress?
  
  " "She's
  only hemmed it over," he said, "at the edges.
  
  Have it again if you want, I had to find something for her.
  
  " His
  mother was heard on the stair, and entering
  Looked hard at Helen and went and kissed Reave.
  
  Who said, "I
  shall stay at home now, mother: Helen's come home.
  
  "
  "Yes.
  
  How do you do.
  
  " Her red-brown eyes brushed Helen's
  body from the neck to the ankles, "I'll have them heat
  Bathwater.
  
  " Helen trembled and said, "How kind.
  
  There are
  showers in all the camps: if you mean anything else:
  Reave seems content.
  
  " "Very well.
  
  He's easily of course contented.
  
  He picks up things by the road: one of them
  I've allowed to live here: to speak honestly
  In hope to keep his mind off another woman: but that cramps
  and can't change.
  
  " "If I knew what I want!"
  Helen cried suddenly.
  
  "The girl is a servant here," Reave said.
  
  "I hate the spitefulness of women.
  
  The housework
  Needed help when you were not here.
  
  " Then Helen: "She's quite
  sick I think: she'll have to clear out I think.
  
  Yet something in me felt kindly toward that little wax face
  In my old clothes.
  
  I came home against my will.
  
  Why isn't Mark
  here?
  
  " The far door opened for Olvidia,
  Unable to imagine any pretext for entrance, but unable to bridle
  her need
  Of coming, to stare and smile from flat black eyes.
  
  Behind her
  Johnny Luna was seen peering, but dared not enter.
  
  Then Helen wondered, where was that thin little thing?
  
  Crying somewhere?
  
  And Reave's mother said: "Now you'll cut down
  The old cable, as you promised, Reave.
  
  We're tired of seeing it.
  
  You'll have time now.
  
  " He answered, "Where's Mark, mother?
  
  Helen just asked you.
  
  " "I heard her.
  
  Sitting under a bush on the hill, probably.
  
  Your wife's adventures
  Stick in his throat.
  
  " Then Helen, trembling, and the words marred
  By sudden twitchings of her lips: "I'm not ashamed.
  
  No reason
  to be.
  
  I tried to take myself out of here
  And am brought back by threats and by force, to a gray place like a
  jail, where the sea-fog blows up and down
  From the hill to the rock, around a house where no one ever
  loved or was glad.
  
  But your spite's nothing,
  Pour it out, I'll swim in it: and fear Reave but not you, and maybe
  after while .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  That's all.
  
  Reave, I'll go up
  And change my dress before supper, if your .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  if little wax-face
  you know .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  has left me any
  Clothes in the closet.
  
  "
  She went upstairs; the others were silent,
  Until the old woman: "Ah why, why," she said, "Reave,
  Did you have to bring back .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I know.
  
  You had to.
  
  Your mind
  Sticks in its own iron: when you've said 'I will
  Then you're insane, the cold madness begins.
  
  It's better than weakness,"
  He answered with shamefast look shunning her eyes, "I must tell
  you, mother,
  Though it may seem strange: I love her, you know.
  
  Some accident,
  Or my neglect, changed her; I'll change her over
  And bring the gold back.
  
  " "You talk like poor Mark.
  
  Oh, worse.
  
  Mark at least feels disgust.
  
  A woman that can't it seems
  Even have babies.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  About the old cable:
  He's been seeing lately .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  your father: the man who's dead .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Pitifully staring up at it in the evenings.
  
  He broods on that.
  
  The shock of your disgrace I believe
  Started his mind swarming, and he hobbles out
  In the starlight.
  
  I wish you to keep your promise
  And cut that ruin from our sky.
  
  It's bad for Mark
  To remember his father; and I've a feeling
  The memory slacks us all, something unlucky will clear
  When that cord's cut.
  
  Don't you hate seeing it?
  
  " "Oh, yes,
  Like anything else that's no use.
  
  It'd fall by itself
  Some winter.
  
  I'll cut it down.
  
  There are trees under it
  That have to be saved.
  
  Mother, I won't ask you
  To make friends with my wife: you're not to fuss either.
  
  And don't prod her with Hester.
  
  We'll have some peace in the house,
  Or I'll growl too.
  
  "
  XI
  Mark's lameness appeared more painful than
  formerly; Helen from the window seeing him
  Limping across the dooryard, she went and followed.
  
  He stood
  by the sycamore, under great yellowing leaves,
  And Helen: "You hardly spoke to me last night, though a year
  had passed.
  
  Have I lost your love, my brother?
  
  I valued it.
  
  I need it more than in happier times.
  
  " "That .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " he answered,
  "Oh Helen!" "Because I could hardly think how to live here,"
  she said, "without it.
  
  " "I have no color of words
  To say how dearly .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  When I seem dark: you must think of
  me as a foolish day-dreamer
  Whose indulgence turns and clouds him, so that he sees a dead man
  Walk on the deck, and feels the ship sailing
  Through darkness to a bad place.
  
  " She, astonished with memory:
  "The ship, the ship?
  
  " "You see.
  
  My foolish dreams
  Twine into my common talk.
  
  Maybe it's my hearing at night
  The watery noises and hoarse whisper of the shore that sets me
  Into that dream, I feel the see-sawing keel, my mind tries darkly
  ahead under the stars
  What destiny we're driving toward.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Do you think, Helen,
  a dead man's
  Soul can flit back to his scene long afterwards?
  
  " "Your father,
  you mean?
  
  But I was lying in the scrawny desert,
  A thousand miles from any noise of the shore.
  
  It scared me because
  I seem to remember hearing
  That to dream of a ship means death .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "If that's all," he
  smiled meagerly:
  "If we both dream it.
  
  I, for one, shan't trouble
  My survivors with any starlight returns, but stick to peace
  Like a hungry tick.
  
  " "Oh," she said eagerly, "hush.
  
  It's wicked to talk like that.
  
  " He was silent, then said,
  "Did you love him, Helen?
  
  " She clenched her hands, and turning
  Her head from him, "I thought you'd ask that.
  
  What's love?
  
  "
  And laid her hand on the leaning pillar of the tree
  To turn herself back to his face, to study no higher
  Than the lean jaw and strained mouth, lower than the eyes,
  And carefully said, "Of course I loved him; but I believe
  My shining terror of Reave was the cause.
  
  For now that desert stalk's cut, the old root of fear
  Seems aching to a new flowering.
  
  Why do I fear him?
  
  I know for
  certain
  He'll neither kill me nor beat me, I've proved it: and I even
  tricked him out of his vengeance, you know, he came home
  With nothing but me.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Where did he get that Hester?
  
  No,
  tell me after while.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  , Listen.
  
  I used to think
  That the only good thing is a good time: I've got past that .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Into the dark.
  
  I need something, I can't know what it is.
  
  " She
  thought in her heart: "I know.
  
  To humble your strong man, that's what I need.
  
  " And said: "To
  be free.
  
  He called me a harlot, Marie.
  
  I am a
  Harlot of a rare nature.
  
  The flesh is only a symbol.
  
  Oh, can't you
  see me
  Beaten back and forth between the two poles, between you and
  Reave?
  
  "
  She watched, that his lips moved like a plucked string,
  So that she thought "It can be done," and said,
  "The one pole's power, that I tried to escape: that strong man,
  you know:
  And have been .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  retrieved, and can't tell whether I hate him
  Or what.
  
  The second, you can name better than I:
  The power behind power, that makes what the other can only
  Direct or destroy.
  
  See how wise I've grown.
  
  Dear: in the desert
  I cried a good deal at night: it wasn't for Reave,
  Nor for his mother! my eyelids rained in the dusty
  Country where rain's not natural.
  
  I'd look up the night
  And see the sharp dry stars like great bubbles
  Blown up and swollen, full of most bitter rainbows,
  Float on the wave of the world: it was for you
  My tears ran down.
  
  "
  She watched his mouth, in the thought
  That if she stretched romance to laughter, or his doubting point,
  She'd be warned by his lips: but Mark perhaps had not even
  heard her; he said, "I used to thank God
  Whatever it is that's coming, Helen's not here.
  
  If even she's crying
  in the night somewhere: she's flown
  Like a bird out of the hands of our catcher.
  
  Now you've come
  home! .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh, at better times
  I think my fears are only a flaw of the mind;
  Or else that the dark ship driving to its drowning
  Is only my own poor life: that might go down
  Without a bubble.
  
  " She angrily: "Reave at least
  Is something solid to fear .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You and your shadows!
  I was going to make love to you, Mark,
  All to spite Reave and because he bores me, but your nonsense
  Has run mine out of breath.
  
  You've missed something.
  
  Tell me about this .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what's her name?
  
  Reave's wisp,
  All eyes and hair.
  
  " Mark failed to answer; she looked
  And saw his face fixed and anxious.
  
  "What's the matter now?
  
  "
  "Is that Reave?
  
  " he whispered.
  
  "Exactly.
  
  What's in Reave
  To make you dome out your eyes like a caught fish?
  
  "
  "He's staring up at the cable, Helen! The old man stands in
  That same place and stares up at the cable
  Every night.
  
  " "Soon to miss his amusement, poor ghost.
  
  Reave's planning to take it down.
  
  Be sure when Reave looks up
  He has a purpose.
  
  "
  He approached and said, "To-morrow morning
  We'll cut it down.
  
  But the best trees in the canyon
  Stand in the shadow of its fall.
  
  I've planned a way to tie the cut end with rope
  And steer it west in its fall, and I hope clear them.
  
  They must take their chance.
  
  " He looked at Mark and said,
  "We'll feel better
  After the old advertisement of failure's down.
  
  It's cobwebbed the canyon for twenty years.
  
  " He looked at
  Helen:
  "We'll start a new life to-morrow.
  
  " She marvelled secretly
  At the reasonless anger that ran through her dry nerves like a
  summer grass-fire, and shrilly, "You and I?
  
  " she answered,
  "Or you and your .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  little floozie, that whittled match?
  
  "
  He frowned, his temples darkened with the heavy muscle
  Setting the jaw, he said in a moment: "I've given Hester notice
  to go.
  
  She's going to-morrow.
  
  You're staying.
  
  So rest your mind.
  
  " "Ah, Ah," she said, "be
  proud of strength while you can.
  
  Cut the cable
  And forget your father.
  
  Whatever fails, cut it down.
  
  Whatever
  gets old or weakens.
  
  Send Hester packing
  Because a bigger woman's brought home.
  
  If a dog or a horse
  have been faithful, kill them on the shore of age
  Before they slacken.
  
  See to keep everything around you as strong
  and stupid
  As Reave Thurso.
  
  " And turning suddenly:
  "Oh, Mark, tell me what's good, I don't know which way to
  turn.
  
  Is there anything good?
  
  Whisper, whisper.
  
  That mould of hard beef and bone never asks,
  He never wonders, took it ready-made when he was a baby,
  never changes, carft change.
  
  You and I
  Have to wonder at the world and stand between choices.
  
  That's
  why we're weak and ruled.
  
  If we could ever
  Find out what's good, we'd do it.
  
  He'd be surprised.
  
  What a rebellion!" She changed and said, "Reave?
  
  Let that girl stay a week; you might need her yet.
  
  In any case I'd like to know her a little.
  
  She keeps out of my way, I haven't had time.
  
  A week or two.
  
  " He, staring: "That's a sickly thing
  For a man's wife to want.
  
  No.
  
  She's going
  At the set time.
  
  If you can't tell what's good:
  It's lucky I have a compass and can steer the ship.
  
  "
  "Oh, Oh.
  
  That ship again?
  
  " she cried laughing,
  "Maybe there's something in it, if even Reave .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Can you feel it straining through the dark night?
  
  Mark: you heard him:
  He's a dreamer too.
  
  You'd never imagine it,
  To see him stand there so fleshy, shaking his head
  Like a bull in fly-time: if he dreams he'll fall yet.
  
  We'll try.
  
  "
  She turned and went toward the house.
  
  Reave said, "What was all that?
  
  There was a time when I'd have stared at myself
  For bringing home .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  and letting it talk and talk
  As if it had rights in the world.
  
  It's her colored abounding life
  That makes her lovely.
  
  " "She's tied to you," Mark answered,
  "Like a falcon tied up short to a stone, a fierce one,
  Fluttering and striking in ten inches of air.
  
  I believe deeply
  You're precious to each other.
  
  " "Hm.
  
  I bear clawing
  As well as anyone.
  
  " Mark, earnestly: "Oh be good to her,
  Not to let her be hurt in the coming time.
  
  "
  "No more of that, Mark.
  
  You know these forebodings
  Date from our time in France and the muddy splinter
  That wrecked your ankle.
  
  You must make allowances.
  
  " He answered,
  "You'd think
  This rocked-in gorge would be the last place in the world to bear
  the brunt: but it's not so: they told me
  This is the prow and plunging cutwater,
  This rock shore here, bound to strike first, and the world behind
  will watch us endure prophetical things
  And learn its fate from our ends.
  
  " "Booh.
  
  We'll end well," he answered,
  laughing, "the world won't watch.
  
  When you and I toast long white beards and old freckled hands,
  and Helen
  Like a little shrivelled apple by the fire between us
  Still faintly glows, in the late evenings of life,
  We'll have the fun that old people know, guessing
  Which of us three will die first.
  
  I dare say the world
  Will be quite changed then.
  
  " "You're very hopeful.
  
  But even you
  I think feel the steep time build like a wave, towering to break,
  Higher and higher; and they've trimmed the ship top-heavy.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Do you take it down to-morrow?
  
  " "Ah?
  
  The cable you mean?
  
  I told you: in the morning.
  
  You must all come and watch.
  
  The fall will be grand.
  
  Those things have weight.
  
  "
  XII
  Helen had gone
  As if she carried news in her mind through the house to the
  kitchen; there dark Olvidia
  Stood big and ominous in a steam of beef boiling.
  
  "Where's your
  helper, Olvidia, the little mop
  That pares potatoes?
  
  " She answered sadly, "Is cabbage too.
  
  " "I
  say where's the elf-child,
  The inch with the yellow hair?
  
  Ought to be helping you.
  
  "
  "Oh, that?
  
  She going away.
  
  " "To-morrow, maybe.
  
  Where is she now?
  
  " The Indian rolled her dun eyes
  Toward the open door of the laundry, and Helen passing
  Looked all about among piled tubs and behind
  An old desk of Reave's father's; the girl she sought
  Stood up in a corner.
  
  "What enormous eyes you have.
  
  Why were you hiding?
  
  " Helen said.
  
  "Oh no.
  
  I'd done my work,"
  She answered plaintively,
  "I was just thinking here.
  
  I have to go away to-morrow.
  
  " "Wearing my dress," Helen said.
  
  "Did you come here without any clothes at all?
  
  " "He .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Mr.
  
  Thurso .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  mine were worn out,
  He burned them up.
  
  " "A handkerchief would cover you, though.
  
  I don't believe you weigh ninety pounds
  Without the weight of my clothes.
  
  Oh, you're welcome.
  
  I think I'll take the prettiest one in the closet
  And cut it to fit you like finch's feathers.
  
  Is your name Hester?
  
  How can you bear Reave's weight,
  Your body's the width of my arm?
  
  " The girl trembled
  And twisted herself sidewise.
  
  "Aren't you angry at me?
  
  "
  "Oh no," Helen said; and anxiously: "I don't know.
  
  I'm lost.
  
  Oh why should I be angry, nothing is worth .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Nothing, I believe.
  
  Do you want to stay here?
  
  Don't you hate Reave?
  
  I do.
  
  Madly.
  
  " The other with a begging whine: "I'd work.
  
  You are so kind.
  
  " And whispered, "I might do all
  The old Spanish woman's work, you could let her go.
  
  "
  Then Helen suddenly, her lips withering
  From the white teeth: "Olvidia, come here.
  
  This scrap
  Wants us to fire you: she wants to be with my husband:
  Take both our places, how's that for treachery?
  
  Because she's
  nothing earthly but a stack of hair and enormous
  Gray eyes, thinks I'll stand anything.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Wives hate your
  trade, don't you know that?
  
  " "I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  didn't understand.
  
  I
  thought you
  Meant me to stay.
  
  I never felt safe before, but here I had my own
  room and was warm enough,
  And Mr.
  
  Thurso was never drunk.
  
  " "Oh, that was something.
  
  Where did you come from?
  
  " She looked at Olvidia's dark expressionless
  face, and sidling a little nearer
  To Helen for shelter: "Hymettus, Nebraska: I lived with my
  aunt Margaret, she was always punishing me
  Because my uncle wouldn't let me alone.
  
  She was big and thin.
  
  I ran away with a boy but he soon left me.
  
  I tried to get rides west, people would keep me awhile
  And turn me out.
  
  I think I was going to die
  When Mr.
  
  Thurso saw me beside the road.
  
  "
  "And loaded you into the farm-truck, ah?
  
  Go on.
  
  " "He gave me some bread and got some coffee
  At the next place.
  
  I've been happy here.
  
  Oh,
  What will become of me now?
  
  " "I can't guess," Helen said.
  
  "My
  husband
  Can't change his mind: so you'll have to go, whatever you and
  I want.
  
  It jams in the slot; nothing
  Will budge it after that, not with a crowbar.
  
  What will he be at
  fifty, ah?
  
  How old are you, Hester?
  
  "
  "Eighteen .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  nineteen.
  
  " "I expect it's true: that stack of hair,
  Olvidia, took time to grow.
  
  " Olvidia
  Scowled and said darkly to Hester: "You set the table.
  
  It's time for dinner.
  
  " The girl moved quickly to obey, but Helen:
  "Stay here.
  
  "
  She stood then in white anxiety
  Between the two, and suddenly began to weep.
  
  Helen went near her and said, "I want awfully
  To know you, Hester.
  
  There's deep strangeness in your
  Wanting to stay in this place.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Olvidia, I'm still your mistress:
  Make us two sandwiches: set the table yourself.
  
  Sandwiches: meat between bread.
  
  " She said to Hester:
  "You're not false, I think.
  
  Helpless; perfectly;
  A person without any will: mine's only hiding.
  
  If I could just imagine what's good, or even
  What's bad, you'd see the machine move like a ship.
  
  You mustn't fear Reave, either.
  
  He has a great will, frittered away on trifles,
  Farm things, and you and me.
  
  And unable to strike a woman:
  So we needn't fear to take food in our hands
  And go and play on the shore.
  
  Yes, I command you.
  
  That makes it easy.
  
  "
  They walked under the alders that pave the
  gorge, and Helen: "Does it taste mouldy,
  The meat of this house?
  
  But you must eat and not waste it or
  you'll be sorry, for freedom, Hester, that's coming,
  Is a hungry condition.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Where will you go to?
  
  " "He says
  I must go to San Francisco.
  
  " Helen looked, and laughed
  To see tears in her eyes.
  
  "You're crazy to cry about that.
  
  You
  wouldn't stay in this wretched crack
  Between two rocks?
  
  Come along, walk faster.
  
  Hester: that first time,
  When you ran away with a boy: did you want a boy,
  Or only you didn't dare go alone?
  
  Ah?
  
  I think that's
  What makes you cry.
  
  It keeps grinding in my mind
  That maybe I too .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  just to break jail .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It would be a dirty discovery.
  
  "
  The creek-bank path
  Straightened a moment, so that a great aisle of bright breathing ocean
  Stood clear ahead, and Helen: "Hester: do you know what?
  
  I'm going with you.
  
  I'll cut my hair to the bone
  And borrow Johnny Luna's greasy black hat,
  We'll fly away.
  
  I'll work for you, beg if we have to,
  We'll try all the roads in America
  And never quarrel; no disgust and no bullying.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Dear, it won't do.
  
  You'd obey orders, we know: but look at these hips
  And breasts of mine: these bulges in a man's blue-jeans
  Would bulge the laws of nature, ah?
  
  My affections
  Go with my build, we're talking froth, dear,
  Only to poultice the inner bitterness: taste me and you'd call
  Quinine honey.
  
  "
  Suddenly emerging at the creek-mouth beach
  they breathed and stood still.
  
  The narrow crescent
  Of dark gravel, sundered away from the world by its walls of
  cliff, smoked in a burst of sun
  And murmured in the high tide through its polished pebbles.
  
  The
  surf broke dazzling on fins of rock far out,
  And foam flowed on the ankles of the precipice.
  
  Helen looked
  up, cliff over cliff, the great naked hill
  All of one rifted rock covering the northwest sky; and said: "It's
  called Thurso's Landing.
  
  That's something,
  To have the standing sea-cliffs named after you.
  
  His father used
  to swing down the barrels of lime
  From the head of that to the hulls of ships.
  
  The old wrecks of
  rusting engines are still to be seen up there,
  And the great concrete block that anchors the cable.
  
  I hope you'll stay
  To see it come down.
  
  He said, in the morning.
  
  You'll ride the
  mail-stage, I think:
  Passes at noon.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Will you have the willow or the rock, Hester,
  To undress beside?
  
  " "What .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what is it?
  
  " "For a swim.
  
  Didn't they have a swimming-pool in Nebraska?
  
  Here's ours.
  
  " "I can't.
  
  Oh, Oh.
  
  " "You can duck up and down
  In the long waves," Helen said, laughing.
  
  "Undress.
  
  What do you think we came down for, to see cormorants?
  
  "
  "The cold will kill me.
  
  " She answered, "You by this rock
  And I by that one.
  
  I've been ruled with dull iron,
  Now I'll rule you at least.
  
  "
  She went, and returned
  In a moment, clean of clothing, but her small companion
  Stood shivering in a worn cotton under-shift
  And quavered, "I'll go down like this.
  
  " Helen suddenly
  Anxious and haggard, standing far off, with a screaming voice:
  "I told you I want to see you: if I die of it.
  
  Nothing can be worse than what I imagine.
  
  Take off that rag.
  
  " She sobbing and obedient
  Dropped it to the ankles and stepped out and stood
  Furled like a sail to the mast, the straw-thin arms
  Crossed on her breast, the hands hugging the tiny
  Bones of her crooked shoulders in the golden under-spray
  Of coiled-up hair.
  
  Helen stared and sighed, "Nothing
  But a white bony doll"; and turning to the sea: "We're all monstrous
  Under the skins, but nothing is real I think
  Even if you can’t see it.
  
  Come on, poor thing, let's be launched;
  the foam-ripple's
  Like running cream and the clouds gather.
  
  "
  She went down and
  Hester followed helplessly a few sad steps,
  But when the steel chill of the wave ached in her feet stood still,
  whining between hammering teeth, then Helen
  Caught her by the hand and dragged her thigh-deep, still keeping
  her face averse from her victim, like one compelled
  To handle a loathsome thing she made her dance in the waves.
  
  "Don't you love it, Hester, isn't this cold
  More noble than the heat of a sleeping man?
  
  Here comes a foamhead.
  
  I hate the man, yet I can hardly
  Keep back my hands from holding you down and drowning
  you; why's that, why's that?
  
  " while Hester childlike lamenting
  Danced up and down as the seas deepened.
  
  Helen said, "He killed
  my friend
  In the bitter desert, a beautiful youth
  Yellow-haired like you, like you a wanderer.
  
  He flung a hammer,"
  She said, seeing in her mind the running lizard
  That Reave had killed, "My dear friend fell, and that man
  Who seems so quiet and controlled wallowed like a boar
  Gnashing and trampling.
  
  There was no help anywhere
  In all the abominable flat lifeless plain.
  
  When Reave stood up
  A crooked red stump that had no eyes was dying in the sand,
  instead of the blond beautiful body
  I had often hugged in my arms.
  
  I heard it die.
  
  We travelled on,
  blinded with thirst and sun,
  And left it blackening; there are no tears in the desert,
  Water's too precious there.
  
  "
  A greater wave came, gathering
  The mottled lit blue water in a bladed heap, then Helen braced
  well apart
  Her straight white legs, and lifted her little nearly fainting companion
  over the comb of the wave,
  So that the face was clear and the yellow hair felt but the spray.
  
  In the trough behind the white wave
  Helen shook her dark head, the water sluiced from her shoulders
  And rose-tipped breasts.
  
  "Fear nothing, Hester, I'm strong enough.
  
  That deadly secret I told you: if you should dare
  To tell it again, think what might happen: a hanging.
  
  I might be freed.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Look up: there he comes now: can't live
  without us.
  
  " She jeered, "Look at him,
  Stolid on the wild colt.
  
  " They were looking shoreward and a
  wave covered them,
  Then Helen drew her companion from the roaring foam and
  carried her ashore.
  
  Thurso's half-broken mount
  Danced on the sea's edge in beaten terror, the thin black whip
  streaked the brown flanks; and Helen Thurso
  Like a myth of dawn born in the west for once, glowing rose
  through white all her smooth streaming body
  Came through the foam, and dragged beside her for a morning
  star fainting and dull in the rose of dawn
  That wisp of silver flesh and the water-darkened burden of hair;
  She stood panting, unable to speak, and Thurso
  Felt through his underconsciousness something morbid and menacing
  In blue-shadowed silver foiled upon glowing rose, against the livid
  Foam, the tongues of cobalt water, and the shark-fin gray
  Rocks of the inlet, for now the sun was clouded,
  All colors found their significance; then Helen wrestling for
  breath:
  "Ah, Reave.
  
  Here, Reave.
  
  I knew you'd come, I left word with Olvidia.
  
  Here's your wet honey: without my dress to pad her life-size
  Compare us two.
  
  " His face wried and dark red,
  He twitched the whip in his hand, choking with anger, and
  Helen:
  "That's for your colt: not me you daren't.
  
  You haven't the
  courage, simply you haven't the courage.
  
  This peeled thing"
  She held Hester by the wrist not to escape "this peeled and
  breastless willow-twig here feared you
  Until I told her .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Strike, strike.
  
  Let her see you.
  
  " He shuddered
  and blackened, laboring for words, and groaned, "Go home.
  
  Get on your clothes.
  
  " "Now I’ve learned something," she answered,
  "that even a thin slip like this is a better lover
  Than any .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  strike me, not her!" She let Hester go, who vanished
  instantly, and Helen raised both round arms
  To unguard her smooth flanks and said writhing, "That whip of yours
  Might do what no love nor strength .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  you've never let yourself go,
  You've never .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I always bitterly feared you:
  Give me cause.
  
  I could bear much.
  
  I'd not move nor scream
  While you wrote the red stripes:
  But there's no nature in you, nothing but .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  noble .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Nothing but .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  one of those predestined stone men
  For women to respect and cheat .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " She was suddenly weeping
  And shivering; she leaned her face toward his knee
  And the horse danced sidewise, with a dull clashing sound
  Of unshod hooves in the pebbles, curving its body
  Away from her and against the whip; she stood back,
  Saying, "He thinks I'm a monster out of the sea.
  
  I'm not like .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  what you think.
  
  I'd have kissed your stirrup:
  But that's not sense either.
  
  " She limped like an old woman
  Across the gravel toward her clothing, bent over,
  Stroking the sea-water off.
  
  XIII
  It is certain that too violent
  Self-control is unlucky, it attracts hard events
  As height does lightning; so Thurso rode up the canyon with a
  little death in himself,
  Seeing in his mind Helen's naked body like a red bird-cage
  Welted with whip-stripes; and having refused the precious relief
  of brutality, and being by chance or trick
  Cheated of revenge on her desert lover, he endured small deaths
  in his mind, atrophied spots, like mouse-holes
  For the casual malice of things to creep in uncountered: so
  shortened by refusal of a fair act, Thurso
  Rode up from the shore in the frown of fortune.
  
  The cress-paved
  pools of the stream, the fortifying beauty on the north
  Of the rock rampart, and toward the south of the forested slope,
  and the brave clouds with flashing bellies
  Crossing the gorge like a fleet of salmon, were as nothing to him.
  
  Once he jerked back the colt's
  Bit-spread jaws to its breast and half turned back
  To the shore again, but sat bewildered a moment
  And snapped his teeth together and rode on, imagining
  Some work to do.
  
  He tied the colt by the house-door
  And went through the house to a closet where hunting-gear,
  Guns, traps and vermin-poisons were kept, he fetched some
  pounds of bitter barley in the butt of a sack
  To abate the pest of ground-squirrels.
  
  Returning through the
  still rooms
  He met his mother and said, "I've been to the beach, where they
  were bathing.
  
  I'm going to the upper field
  With squirrel-poison.
  
  " She said, "In October?
  
  " "Nobody else
  Seems to have kept them down, in my absences.
  
  Without some killing they'll breed armies in spring.
  
  "
  "Mark isn't able to kill, Luna's too lazy:
  I ought to have driven him: I didn't think of it, Reave,
  Not being often in the fields.
  
  " He sighed and said,
  "I wish it would rain.
  
  Mother, you have been right
  To dislike that woman.
  
  I guess you're right.
  
  " She turned
  Her reddish flint eyes from his face to the window,
  Thinking "What now has she done?
  
  " and saying, "Nobody
  Can praise your choices.
  
  Soft pliable men have the luck in love.
  
  Maybe you can get rid of her without much trouble.
  
  "
  He answered fiercely, "Why did you let Luna
  Bridle the brown colt while I was away?
  
  He broke it with a whip: it was gente-natured.
  
  Don't speak, mother, of Helen.
  
  I never will let her go until she is dead.
  
  "
  The old woman, sharply eyeing him again: "If you could stand her
  Under the iron skip when you cut the cable
  To-morrow morning.
  
  " He looked down at the flat
  White hair on the gray forehead and laughed doubtfully
  Without knowing why.
  
  "Our ship sails when I cut the cable.
  
  He ought to be whipped himself: Johnny a horse-breaker!
  The colt is spoilt.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I must ask you, mother,
  Not to interfere between mine and me.
  
  Whatever you say about the stock or the fields
  I'll see to very patiently: my wife is my own concern,
  You must not meddle.
  
  " "I have no desire to: as you know clearly,
  Reave,
  In your mind's quiet time.
  
  " "What does that mean, that I seem
  excited: drunk, hm?
  
  Wrong, mother, quite wrong.
  
  I've noticed in other autumns, when the earth bakes brittle and
  the rains
  lag, I become gloomy and quarrelsome,
  But not this year.
  
  Cheerful.
  
  Squirrel-poison's
  What I came in for,
  To sow it in the fields above: they increased out of all bounds in
  my absences.
  
  "
  He left the house
  And rode up the hill to the gray stubble-field, where many
  ground-squirrels scampered away before him, or erected
  Like pegs on mounds of dug earth before their house-doors
  barked shrill warning to each other in the sunny air,
  While Thurso, leading his horse about the borders of the field,
  laid at the mouth of each burrow and carefully
  In the little trackways light treacherous gifts; he mounted and
  rode to the lower plowland.
  
  From thence returning
  Above the path of dazzle on the burnished sea, he heard one of
  his vermin singing its terror
  In the first pain of death; its chirping voice was muffled in the
  earth; and Thurso likewise went down
  Out of the tension of the sun to the shadowed canyon.
  
  Where the
  path from the hill
  Joined one that wound into the redwoods, he saw his brother
  Cross hastily and glance toward him, and labor down
  Like a hobbled horse, the plunge and drag of lame haste.
  
  Reave overtook him.
  
  Mark said, "Look.
  
  Now he stands.
  
  I was talking to him until he drifted away
  As if a wind had come up.
  
  Reave, I beg you
  Ride some way around, or he'll glide off again
  And never tell me the rest.
  
  " Reave leaned in the saddle
  And took his brother by the shoulder: "Come up from dreams,
  old fellow.
  
  This won't do, you'll be sick again.
  
  These fancies
  Are nothing if you don't yield.
  
  " "Keep your hand off me.
  
  "
  He said angrily.
  
  "If you can't see him clear
  Against the dark leaves of laurel: blindness is all.
  
  He's wearing a different coat, and his tie-pin's
  A small jade mask I never noticed before.
  
  Ss: quiet; he's coming towards us.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  You told me, father .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ah, Ah.
  
  " The deranged man's trembling excitement
  Infected the ill-tamed colt, it sweated and shuddered
  Between Reave's knees, with hard breathings
  Cupping its ears toward the image that Mark imagined,
  But the bit and the knees held it.
  
  Mark, mournfully: "Then death's
  No nearer peace.
  
  No dreamlessness.
  
  That's bad.
  
  " He listened
  again,
  And shrewdly answered, "Harmonized: happier, happier?
  
  I do wish to have faith: but your voice, father,
  Sounds flat of happiness, and all the woes of the world
  Seem hosting behind your smile.
  
  For God's sake tell me
  The honest truth.
  
  " He listened, and said painfully,
  "Make me sure of it.
  
  For if the blind tugging here
  And self-contempt continue, and death's no peace,
  It would be better to live forever .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  but best, best,
  Never've been born.
  
  " He listened again and said,
  "I'll try .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Then turning to Reave; who sat like bronze,
  Half his mind grieving to hear his brother's madness, and half
  Busied with its own bitterness: "He says to warn you,
  Let his work stand.
  
  He says honor your father
  That your days may .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I have it wrong.
  
  Shortened?
  
  Shortened?
  
  Because death's better, I suppose.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Not to pull down his work.
  
  " Reave laughed impatiently,
  Saying, "Tell that imagination I honor as much
  As I can see of him: that's nothing.
  
  A perfect ground-squirrel,
  Pop out of life for the first dog that barked
  Into the shady earth.
  
  Come down to the house
  And rest, brother.
  
  We owe him no duties
  If he were really in the wind here.
  
  " He laid his hand again on
  Mark's shoulder,
  Whose loaded nerves suddenly discharging at the touch of restraint
  struck his clenched bony fist
  To the neck of the colt; that flew a leap sidewise and three
  forward in the crackling brushwood, then breathed itself
  With vertical flights and humped bone-rigid landings.
  
  Reave
  hurt it with whip and bridle, he squeezed it tame
  Between his two knees and angrily returned.
  
  Mark meanwhile,
  following his vision,
  With no mind for this world, questioned it hard
  About that other, he ate its fallacious answers
  Together with his own doubts, like a starved man gulping
  The meal with the weevils.
  
  "Life's all a dream," it said,
  "And death is a better more vivid immortal dream
  But love is real; both are made out of love,
  That's never perfect in life, and the voids in it
  Are the pains of life; but when our ungainly loads
  Of blood and bone are thrown down, then the voids close,
  Love becomes perfect, all's favor and immediate joy,
  For then we are what we love.
  
  " So the false prophet
  Sang sweetly, Mark was drunken with the easy ecstasy,
  But while he listened his eyes kept wavering down
  From the face to the throat of his vision, to that tie-pin
  Tipped with white jade: that also had a face, carved
  In the bright waxy stone, and was grown bigger,
  The face was Helen's.
  
  The spectre sang that love
  Must become conscious of itself and claim its own,
  Mark's gaze drifting again to the stone at its throat
  Found a cleft whiteness, for the carving reversed
  Was now the beautiful fork of female thighs,
  And the little hill: because the seer was virgin,
  Knowing only pictures of women, he saw smooth white
  What's rough in nature; but very smooth was too rough
  For that intolerant sick mind.
  
  He fled back in terror,
  Crying shrilly,
  "I can't.
  
  I can't.
  
  Oh, Reave, the cunning devil
  Was making traps to take me, and I have conceived
  A monstrous thing, poisoning the soul with flesh.
  
  Either our dead hate us or the living devil
  Was here instead.
  
  " Reave followed him and coaxed him home,
  Where Helen stood in the room.
  
  They nodded to her
  Like two effigies.
  
  In the night Reave dreamed that Helen
  Lay with him in the deep grave, he awoke loathing her,
  But when the weak moment between sleep and waking
  Was past, his need of her and his judgment of her
  Knew their suspended duel; and he heard her breathing,
  Irregularly, gently in the dark.
  
  XIV
  To save the redwoods under it, a rope was drawn
  From the old cable, near the end to be cut,
  To an oak a little higher than the cable-anchorage
  And fifty yards to the west; so in their falling
  The heavy steel serpent and the hanging iron skip
  Should be deflected enough to miss those highest
  And best-grown trees; the cable would be swung west
  Before the inch rope should take the whole weight and snap,
  Or, holding, be cut at leisure.
  
  Reave had brought up a hack-saw,
  But the blades broke on the strained steel; he wedged a wood block
  In the rusty angle between the black cable and the brown concrete,
  and worked against it with a slim file
  Until four strands were gored through and his palm bleeding; he
  pried the wires back and put Luna to work,
  Himself walking aside, testing the guide-rope's tautness, and
  somewhat wondering
  What engines his father used to sling so great weight so high:
  a man capable of that, blow out
  In the first draught of bad luck like a poor candle!
  In the open, in the fresh morning, high up the precipitous hill, his
  spirit mounted to a kind of cheerfulness;
  He had work to do; and now the sea-wind began, the wool-white
  fog on the ocean detached clouds
  Flying up the gorge of the gulf underfoot, so Thurso felt for a
  moment a little laughably godlike,
  Above the cloud-stream, hewing an old failure from the face of
  nature.
  
  Down in the gorge, from the house dooryard
  The cable and the skip could be seen high up the east, the rapid
  mist-wreaths flowing in the sky below them
  Like ice-cakes under a spidery bridge.
  
  Mark and his mother stood
  on the path to the porch, she'd brought him
  Out of his bedroom to watch the cable go down, hoping it might
  cure sick thoughts.
  
  Hester and Olvidia
  Stood, each alone, at some distance; but Helen came down from
  among the trees.
  
  Then Mark remembering
  His lawless vision trembled at her approach.
  
  She came and said, "Reave left the gate open,
  And the horses were coming out when I happened past.
  
  I never knew him to be forgetful before.
  
  What was he thinking of?
  
  " They looked at her, Mark with eyes
  That mutely implored pardon and fled away,
  His mother made a carefully disinterested
  Stare, and no answer.
  
  Helen stood wilfully near them,
  And said, "How long has it hung?
  
  " After a moment
  Mark answered hoarsely.
  
  And Helen: "Not more?
  
  Eighteen?
  
  I thought it had always hung on these hills.
  
  I've seen it myself
  Through an earthquake and some big winds, and that brush-fire
  Three years ago.
  
  When Reave tackles it,
  Down it shall come.
  
  Not the mountain-backed earth bucking like
  a bad horse, nor fire's
  Red fox-tail on the hills at midnight, nor the mad southeasters:
  nothing can do it
  But Reave Thurso, ah?
  
  That's the man we're measured against.
  
  "
  The old woman considered her once more, smiled, and to Mark:
  "An inch to the mile.
  
  Dear, are you tired standing?
  
  Surely it will not be long now.
  
  " Mark whispered to her,
  "Do you think he cares?
  
  " "Who?
  
  " "Father: his old work
  Falling from the air at last.
  
  " "We'll credit the dead
  With a little more intelligence than to be troubled
  About old iron.
  
  " Helen overheard her,
  And out of the uneasy malice of unhappiness: "Why credit them?
  
  Very likely their minds like their spoiled bodies
  Decay and go down the scale, through childish mutterings
  To poisonous imbecility, and things that seem
  Worthless to us might be to them like playthings
  Precious to children, worth spite, all they've got left .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  "You-"
  The old woman felt Mark's anguish, and pushing by him
  Stood against Helen "weren't asked.
  
  When we're dull and want
  laughter
  We'll ask you to tell us your thoughts.
  
  " Helen retreated
  With looks of startled innocence, "Oh, how have I made you
  angry?
  
  I was praising your son, the other one,
  A man who masters earthquake, storm and bad horses, and has no
  fear of the dead, and can drive a truck
  With his wife in it; never reached out his hand for anything yet
  but down it came.
  
  Look up: he's there
  By the oak-tree, your strong man of this hollow, his feet on a
  cloud.
  
  He'd never falter if a thousand ghosts
  Were camped against him: but look at the size of the man: one
  of those tiny
  Black ants that come to dead things could carry him
  With the oak too.
  
  Mark, you hate cruelty and killers: do you
  know that he spent yesterday
  Poisoning squirrels?
  
  Olvidia told me.
  
  Poor little dusty monkeys whipped for my sins,
  Dying in agony.
  
  " Mark answered hollow and slow,
  "It has to be done, I suppose.
  
  Once he told me,
  No poison no farms.
  
  He said that strychnin's
  What civilized California: there'd still be grizzlies
  And timber-wolves.
  
  " "So all your sweet starts of mercy
  Tune down to that meek end.
  
  Well, Mark: some time
  San Francisco and New York and Chicago will fall
  On the heads of their ghosts, so will that cable.
  
  "
  A small bright falcon,
  Invisible from the floor of the gorge, but Reave saw it
  Above the cloud-stream, shot down the shiny sky
  And lighted on the long cable above the skip,
  Folded its wings, and veered its vizarded face
  With sharp looks north and south.
  
  Reave thought, "All the birds
  Count on this ironware for as fixed as mountains,
  It was here before they were hatched in the high nests,
  Now I'll surprise him.
  
  " He said, "Hand me the axe,"
  For all the weight was hanging on a few cords
  Of twisted wire.
  
  He lifted the dinted axe,
  An old one for rough work.
  
  "Stand clear, Johnny," but the wires
  Were not chewed deep enough yet; the edge nicked and bent them
  Into the block, the whole cable like a hive of bees
  Hummed over the gulf in the hanging air, and the hawk flew,
  But the wires held.
  
  Reave looked at the bright crescent
  Chipped in the brown axe-edge.
  
  "The old man's tough;
  But wait a minute.
  
  " An instant thought of Helen
  Ran like a string of ants over his mind,
  No danger of Helen standing under the skip
  As his mother wished in her spite, but Mark's mind
  Was not secure, better look down.
  
  The trees in the canyon
  Hid the dooryard from here, and Reave went seaward
  Some twenty paces along the steep of the hill
  Through pale oak-leaves and russet ferns to see Mark standing
  By his mother, Helen beside them, foreshortened specks
  On the foot-worn patch of earth from the dark redwoods
  And the globular golden puff of the sycamore
  To the painted roofs of the house.
  
  Light mist flew over them,
  Helen lifted the pin-point white of her face,
  She looked like an incredibly small flower-stock
  Suddenly flowering.
  
  Johnny Luna
  Stood by the cable with a file, and looking down
  Saw the wires move like a scarred twist of worms
  In the wood they were dented into, the all but invisible
  Kinks printed in them by the steel edge straightening,
  A nicked strand broke, then all parted at once
  Very smoothly and instantly.
  
  He saw the scything rope
  That ran from the cable to the oak-tree go west
  And strike Reave standing, he was bent at the loins backward
  And flung on the face of the hill.
  
  Helen also saw,
  But the others watched the great cable and the skip fall,
  Obliquely in the draw of the rope, and the high oak-tree
  Rush down the hill, the arched balks and crooked thighs
  Of root in the scant soil on the near rock
  Channeled with dry-rot, proving less masterful
  Than one inch twist of hemp: so avalanchelike
  The whole tree went down to the gorge, from its great yellow
  furrow on the face of the hill
  A long track of dust blew east, above and below
  The racing clouds.
  
  Thus the long trough and the covering sky
  Of Mill Creek Canyon were cleared of that old cobweb,
  The black moon over the gorge was down, and the mountain lips
  Wiped clean.
  
  Helen Thurso ran up
  Under the trees, through the oak-thicket, up the glacis
  Of gray dead grass to the wreck of the oak-tree,
  And up by the long furrow of the slide to Reave's
  Body on its edge, dragged down and flung aside,
  Like a red root cut by the plow and pitched
  Forth of the furrow.
  
  He was not dead but crawling,
  His belly and legs flat to the ground, his head
  Lifted, like that lizard in the desert, and Helen saw the red ropes
  of muscle
  Labor in his great shoulder, the shirt and the skin flayed off them.
  
  Luna came down from above, then Helen's
  Face frightened him more than his master's body, it was white as
  lightning, eyed and mouthed with darkness, and the strained
  breath
  Whined from the pit of her lungs like a bat's cries.
  
  She stood
  Wavering, Reave crawled at her feet, the gorge glimmered below.
  
  "God evens things.
  
  My lover in the desert,"
  She gasped, "crawled in the sand like that after Reave struck him.
  
  A bushel for a bushel says God exactly.
  
  What can we do?
  
  " Luna stood mute and helpless, the color of
  his Indian skin like pale blue slate.
  
  Reave crawled down hill between them; they watched the corded
  strips of flesh in his shoulder reddening and paling,
  And when he began to speak they were terrified.
  
  "Must 'a' been
  holes in my mind.
  
  Everything wrong.
  
  Won't die.
  
  "
  Helen cried shrilly, "How can we get you down, where can I
  touch you?
  
  " "Hell," he said, "you'll wash.
  
  " "For your pain!"
  She cried shrilly.
  
  He raised up his gray face, fantastically grown
  smaller, hewn thin and focussed
  On resistance, like a flint chip: "Can't worsen it, fool.
  
  I don't die.
  
  Drag.
  
  " They dragged him a little way
  Down the hill and his mother came; in a flash Helen understood
  whose face it was
  That Reave's in pain resembled identically, and felt toward his old
  mother
  Her heart move in a jet of loving compassion
  Wild and lost like peering down a precipice,
  She cried "O mother!" The old woman went to Reave's head
  And carried it against her breast.
  
  Helen and Luna
  Carried his body, so they went tottering down;
  His legs dragged in the feather-gray sage until Olvidia
  And Hester came.
  
  On the steep of the slope came Mark
  Hitching up on hands and knees for his lameness.
  
  Helen thought, "Both her sons crawling!" and cried shrilly,
  "Get out of the way, will you.
  
  He's met somebody
  Stronger than himself.
  
  Now I forgive him, now I forgive him.
  
  I'd die for him.
  
  " The old woman glanced at her
  With astonished hatred across Reave's head.
  
  "You forgive him!"
  XV
  Winter had begun and Reave was brought home from the hospital
  In Monterey.
  
  Luna drove and Helen crouched
  Beside Reave's mattress in the open body of the farm-truck.
  
  She thought they all came by turns to ride in it: pigs and calves
  to the butcher, Hester Clark from Nevada,
  Herself from her lover and the desert mine, and again Reave
  Thurso.
  
  All compelled; all unhappy; all helpless.
  
  Clouds with dragging keels came in from the ocean, over Mai
  Paso bridge a thin rain began,
  Helen drew up the oil-skin over the blanket and said, "I know
  that you suffer pain day and night,
  And now the jolting of the road is torture.
  
  " He was silent a time;
  his face looked like his mother's.
  
  "What of it?
  
  "
  He said suddenly.
  
  "Not to hide it from me, hidden pain's worse.
  
  If you trusted me .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "Do you think rat-gnawings
  Mean much to a man who never any more .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  all the endless
  rest of his life lie flat like a cut tree .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Something to think about, ah?
  
  Have food brought and be wiped,
  grow fat between a tray and a bed-pan,
  While every shiftless and wavering fool in the world
  Has walking legs.
  
  Never waste pity: the cramps and the stabbing
  are my best diversion: if they ever ended
  I'd have to lie and burn my fingers with matches.
  
  Well: day by
  day.
  
  " She watched the small raindrops
  Beading his rough eyebrows and hair, and said "I'd willingly die
  for you; I have not one grain of comfort
  To answer with.
  
  "
  At Sovranes Creek he began to peer about and
  look up the mountain, but dimly
  To be seen through leaning pillars of rain.
  
  "You throw off the
  oilcloth.
  
  What are you looking at, dear?
  
  " "Pasture.
  
  Pasture for cows.
  
  " Helen saw mist-green veils tapering up the
  iron folds to the mountain-head,
  The noble slopes and the crowning pyramid, and suddenly began
  to weep aloud.
  
  He said, "I can't help it.
  
  You promised lightly to take the worse with the better.
  
  This is
  the worse.
  
  I never will let you go until you are dead.
  
  When you played the chippy I went and fetched you back;
  You'll never try it again.
  
  " His focussed will
  Forgot to control the outthrows of bodily pain,
  He ended groaning, with convulsed lips.
  
  Helen answered,
  "I wasn't crying.
  
  I wasn't crying for myself.
  
  I will not be
  At last contemptible.
  
  " And lifting her white throat
  Against the blue hills and rain: "Nothing can break you,
  It was only bones and nerves broke, nothing can change you.
  
  Now I've begun to know good from bad
  I can be straight too.
  
  " "Hell," he said, "changed enough.
  
  Dead legs and a back strapped in plaster.
  
  You'll never
  Be as straight as this.
  
  " Helen shivered in the rain and said,
  "What kind of a doctor was that, who leaves you suffering.
  
  "
  "An honest old man.
  
  He told me plainly that the nerves of pain
  Might live, and the nerves of motion were lost.
  
  He told me,
  When I asked him, that I shall never ride, walk, nor even
  Be able to stand.
  
  " She answered suddenly, "I'll never leave you
  In life or death.
  
  " He smiled and his lips whitened with pain.
  
  He
  said, "How's Mark?
  
  " "Stark mad: all his gentleness
  Gone into vengeful broodings.
  
  He thinks a dead man tore up an
  oak on the mountain .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Reave frowned and said,
  "Exactly.
  
  With my imbecility to spring the trap.
  
  Our fathers
  build and cowardly slip out and we
  Catch the fall.
  
  Not so crazy as you think.
  
  Do you think there's
  anything beyond death, Helen?
  
  "
  "Yes," she answered,
  "Worms.
  
  " "And sleep, without pain or waking.
  
  Don't worry, I'll
  never ease myself out by hand.
  
  The old dog
  Stinks in that alley.
  
  "
  Luna drove fast; Helen leaned on her hands
  for balance in the swirling turn
  Around the cape of the road over Garapatas and said, "How did
  he kill himself?
  
  I never knew.
  
  "
  Reave sharply between tight lips of suffering: "Leave that.
  
  " She
  answered, "He acted cowardly and you despise him,
  But perfect courage might call death like a servant at the proper
  time, not shamefully but proudly.
  
  " His mind
  At civil war in the darkness forgot to control the animal tokens
  of pain, he groaned and answered:
  "Means your freedom, ah?
  
  " "You are right," Helen said, "to expect
  vileness in me: I will show you before the end
  That I am changed.
  
  " "I didn't mean that.
  
  Blind bitterness.
  
  But I
  mean to stick it out, you know, and there's tempting
  Too sweet to be patient with.
  
  I say damn quitters.
  
  "
  The little
  farm-truck, with its dull-smoldering sparks of sad life,
  Ran swiftly on south the wavering and twisted road on the steep
  foot of the mountain sea-wall.
  
  No life
  Ought to be thought important in the weave of the world, whatever
  it may show of courage or endured pain;
  It owns no other manner of shining, in the broad gray eye of the
  ocean, at the foot of the beauty of the mountains
  And skies, but to bear pain; for pleasure is too little, our inhuman
  God is too great, thought is too lost.
  
  It drove above the long crescent beach toward Palo Colorado,
  That is lined with lonely splendor of standing wind-carven rocks,
  like a chariot-racetrack adorned with images,
  Watched by the waving crowds and clamor of the sea, but there
  are no chariots.
  
  Thurso's Landing
  Stood heavy-shouldered in the south beyond.
  
  XVI
  After some days
  and nights Reave called for Luna.
  
  Helen fetched him, Reave instructed him to choose two fence-rails
  And whittle handles on the ends, and nail cross-pieces
  To make a stretcher.
  
  An old tarpaulin was cut
  For canvas, which Helen sewed over and bound with fishline
  Between the two rails.
  
  Reave had thought carefully,
  There was no reason for being jailed in the house,
  There were things he was bound to bear, that was not one of them.
  
  Helen and Olvidia each holding a handle,
  And Luna at the other end, carried him forth
  Heavily, of fantastic shape and weight
  With the plaster girdle about his loins: like a stone man,
  Petrified man, was echoing in Helen's mind
  While she labored with the weight, "Does everything I dream
  come true?
  
  "
  They laid him on a low bank near the corral,
  Where he could turn his head and at times
  See horses in the muddy enclosure.
  
  Or see tall redwoods,
  And if he wished, the long narrow canyon sky,
  Reminding him what its clearance had cost.
  
  One day that Helen
  Was bringing his lunch from the house, she saw Mark
  Waiting in her path; she went about him to avoid him,
  Feeling unable at length to hear his troublesome
  Mysteries with patience, and approached Reave
  An unusual way, unseen and silently, on the new grass
  Around a thicket.
  
  She saw the whitened knuckles
  Of his heavy-boned hands over his breast,
  One clutching the other, and then the fists beaten together
  Like stones, and heard a high helpless moaning.
  
  She stole back
  And broke through the branches into her accustomed path,
  To go to him lying quiet and watching stolidly
  While she came near.
  
  She trembled and set the tray on the ground,
  And said, "May I shift the pillows under you?
  
  " He answered,
  rolling his head,
  "I can shift them.
  
  Look here.
  
  " The bluish bruised look of his
  face darkened, that the gray eyes
  Looked white in it, his thick neck swelled; he was raising himself
  upward with prodigious pain and effort by the thrust
  Of his elbows backward against the earth, saying harshly, "I am
  not helpless.
  
  " He clutched his hands in the soil
  And slowly with immobile face and no groan lay down.
  
  She felt
  in her breast like the rush of a big bird
  Flying from a covert and the threshing wings: "If I'd never been
  here," she said, "nothing would have been the same.
  
  "
  She knew that she ought to be silent, she could not cease, crying
  uncontrollably,
  "You'd not be hurt, you'd be riding on the hill.
  
  I wish I had died
  in misery before you saw me,
  I wish you had seen me first lying five days dead in the jagged
  mountain, blackening on a white rock
  In a dry place, the vultures had dipped their white beaks in my
  eyes, their red heads in my side,
  You'd make them raise the great wings and soar, you'd see my
  bowels drawn out of my body and the rock stained under me
  And the soil of death, I was lying black-mouthed in the filth of
  death.
  
  You'd not have wanted me then, and nothing
  Would be as it is, but you'd be lucky and I quiet.
  
  " He looked
  in her eyes and smiled, with that bruised look,
  Not hearing, bent inward on his own pain; but after a time he
  seemed to remember that she spoke of death
  And said angrily: "Have you death for sale, you talk like a salesman.
  
  Every fool knows it's pleasant to rot in peace
  After long pain but that's not the question.
  
  I saw a nigger boxer in Monterey one night,
  Cut all to pieces,
  Sail on up the wind of fists, beaten and blinded,
  Vomiting blood: he needed only let down
  His knees onto the canvas and be at peace,
  He wouldn't do it.
  
  I say I cared for that man;
  He was better than a better fighter.
  
  "
  XVII
  Reave's doctor came to break the cast from his body; Helen
  helped, and washed the ill-smelling
  Long-enclosed flesh.
  
  Afterwards while Reave rested she spoke
  with his mother in another room.
  
  "You saw him.
  
  The giant shoulders and the pitiful part below.
  
  I know that he
  has hoped secretly to live again .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Ride a horse .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  he'll never sit up in bed.
  
  What can we do?
  
  "
  She answered with a like contorted face,
  But not twitching like Helen's: "There were two oaks broken
  that morning.
  
  What can you do?
  
  Run away.
  
  Follow that Hester.
  
  You and she are out of employment
  When a man's withered from the waist down.
  
  " She answered,
  "Yet I was thinking there's .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  another kindness
  That I could do for him.
  
  Another that his mother can't.
  
  " "What?
  
  "
  she said fiercely.
  
  "Nothing, nothing, nothing,"
  Helen faintly answered.
  
  "However, I'll never leave him.
  
  I promised
  him never to leave him and I've grown faithful
  At last.
  
  " She felt the old woman's eyes like flints press on her
  own, she shuddered and said, "I know
  You hate me: let our spites lie, we're both unhappy.
  
  Tell me
  something, if you know, what's all this troublesome
  Affair of living, and people being troubled and the sun rising
  and setting: what's it all about, what's it for?
  
  I've seen you go on bitterly year after year, living, planning,
  working: do you know something
  That's hidden from the weak like me?
  
  Or it's only
  Gloomy stubbornness like Reave's blind .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  or else perhaps
  we live for no other reason than because our parents
  Enjoyed their pleasure and we dread to die?
  
  I dread it," she said
  with her hands at her throat, "so .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I can't bear it,
  But Reave's too proud.
  
  I mean, if the pain ceases, if his pain ceases
  at last .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  then I can't imagine.
  
  But if the pain keeps up I must do it.
  
  " "What can you do
  But run away off?
  
  You're not the make.
  
  I wish
  He could see your slobbered face, Helen, he'd hardly
  Have hunted into Arizona to fetch it home,
  Do what then?
  
  " Her mouth shuddered and tautened, she answered,
  "I cannot tell.
  
  " "I believe you," she answered scornfully.
  
  Helen stood moving her sad lips
  in silence
  Like one casting a sum of numbers, and said,
  "I must have read it somewhere: a hundred and twenty-three
  Millions in this one country of the world, besides the animals.
  
  Far more in Asia.
  
  How can it be sacred
  Being so common?
  
  I've never hated you back for hating me;
  I’ve called you Mother; now if you'd help me
  To know what's right I'd be grateful.
  
  " The old woman with
  eyes like a hawk's watching
  A bush of sparrows: "Tell me then.
  
  " "For now it seems to me
  that all the billion and a half of our lives on earth,
  And the more that died long ago, and the things that happened
  and will happen again, and all the beacons of time
  Up to this time look very senseless, a roadless forest full of cries
  and ignorance.
  
  But is life precious
  At the worst you know?
  
  I used to wish for round jewels and a
  fur cloak: I could love opals,
  Born in October: and a set of gay laughing friends to fool with,
  and one of those long low stream-lined cars
  That glide quietly and shine like satin: so I can't say, whether
  life maybe might 'a' been precious
  At the best.
  
  And death's awful.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  We're too closed-in here.
  
  "
  "If you think of killing yourself": she laughed,
  Lifting her shoulders.
  
  Helen looked down and said,
  "How did .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Reave's dad do it?
  
  " "In the forehead, poor fool,
  And was long dying.
  
  " "In the heart would have been better?
  
  "
  "You must find out for yourself.
  
  " "I wasn't thinking of myself;
  I'm faithful now.
  
  " "To the death?
  
  Ah?
  
  A new color for you, worn strangely.
  
  "
  She went through the house
  To her son's room.
  
  Helen followed, saying, "Go quietly,
  And listen.
  
  " They tip-toed down to hear a thin moaning
  Increase and break off; then hands beat on the bed
  In the room behind the shut door; a silence followed,
  And again the moaning.
  
  The old woman rolled her gray head
  And whispered, 'Til not awake him.
  
  " But Helen: "If that is sleep,
  Then life's a dream.
  
  " She touched the door-handle
  And the room was full of silence; they entered, Reave lay
  Stolid and strong, meeting them with calm eyes
  Blood-shot around the gray-blue.
  
  Helen said faintly,
  "May I turn you now?
  
  " He said "What meanness in you
  Is always making me out worse than I am?
  
  Helpless enough,
  But not to that point.
  
  " The old woman went to the window
  and looked down the canyon; then turning: "Helen talks strangely.
  
  She says that she's now faithful.
  
  What does that mean, do you
  think?
  
  " Reave answered, "I know she is, and I pay it
  With cross impatiences: I'm sorry, Helen.
  
  " "Oh, but you'd never
  guess," the mother said furiously,
  "How far that reaches, this kind of faithfulness.
  
  She's likely had word
  From the yellow-haired man, because .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " Helen said sharply,
  "That man is dead.
  
  " Reave strained up his head, groaning,
  "Who told you?
  
  Everything slips away.
  
  I was hopeful still
  To touch him with my hands.
  
  He might have come near me
  Sometime to mock my ruin.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " The old woman said,
  "How could she hear?
  
  She's lying, I watched her mouth.
  
  " "Reave
  killed him,"
  Helen said patiently; "only by waiting for him and he didn't
  come, beat him to corrupt earth,
  Dust and a wind.
  
  Oh Reave, be at peace
  For anything you owed there.
  
  " "She was lying again,"
  The mother said, "but a moment ago in the other room
  Her truth came out.
  
  This white, violet-eyed thing
  Would if she dared murder you: Oh, from high motives,
  All mercy and good will like a lamp in a window, but mostly wondering
  Whether a dutiful wife will shoot her man
  In the head or the heart.
  
  " Helen had cried out to speak,
  But checked herself and watched Reave; he answered heavily,
  His light eyes withstanding his mother's dark ones: "We've talked it over,
  But I have forbidden her.
  
  " Then Helen cried, "Don't send me away.
  
  I believe you will never need me: but God's not moderate enough
  to trust, and when he turns bad, no one
  Can bear him to the end.
  
  " He answered, "That's cowardly said;
  there's nothing a man can't bear.
  
  Push my bed
  To the window and let me look out westward.
  
  " They moved
  his bed; in the mouth of the gorge the evening sea-cloud
  Hung heavy black, Jeoparded all over with sanguine fire-spots;
  he muttered wearily, "We're too closed-in here.
  
  I lie like a felled log in a gully and women wrangle above me.
  
  I have no power and no use
  And no comfort left and I cannot sleep.
  
  I have my own law
  That I will keep, and not die despising myself.
  
  "
  The stormy twilight
  closed over and filled the canyon
  And drowned the house, and the ocean made a great noise in
  the dark, crying up the canyon; with between the cries
  Noises like trespassers breaking fences, or the cattle running.
  
  Helen slept in a room by herself,
  For Thurso wanted no witness to hear his nights of endured
  pain, and had sent her from the low couch
  Beside his bed, to use the little room that Hester Clark had
  been glad of.
  
  She fell asleep for a moment and lay an hour
  Terribly awake, and went down the stair, having a candle
  In both her hands, the right hooding the flame
  That etched red lines between the dark fingers,
  The left holding the shaft, and the white grease
  Dripped hot films on it.
  
  She went barefoot and silently
  With the one piece of linen about her, hearing
  The stairs groan like a man, and stole through the house
  To a distant closet where vermin-traps and squirrel-poison,
  Hunting-gear and a smell of leather were kept.
  
  She sought her
  own rifle
  In that close place, meaning to hide it in her bed
  Between the springs and the mattress, knowing that no one
  Commands life without the tools of death
  Readily hid in the background.
  
  She loaded in
  New cartridges with glittering brass jackets, for oil
  Or time might have damped the old; and turned to the door.
  
  Mark stood in the door.
  
  But Helen thought that the strain in her mind had bred a
  phantom,
  And waited for it to fade.
  
  He said, "A thready light
  Pricked into my room through the cracked panel.
  
  I think my mind has been roiled, when I lie wakeful
  Blades of strange light.
  
  Are you going hunting?
  
  Dear Helen let the deer feed.
  
  Life's bad for people,
  But the clean deer, that leap on the high hills
  And feed by the hollow streams, there's not one of them
  Lame nor a fool.
  
  " She answered in her mind, "Nothing
  Is very serious," and said, "Ah, there's one hurt one,
  Would thank me kindly, if it had a man's brain,
  For death, that great fallen stag.
  
  " "Where is it?
  
  I'll feed it
  With tender grass.
  
  " "It fell on the mountain and its broken bones
  Have caught the nerves in their hard lumps of healing,
  So that it's in pain forever: I hate .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  love him too.
  
  Love him, I said.
  
  " "If you kill any living
  Creature, the happiness of your heart is troubled
  In quiet times afterwards.
  
  " "What's that to me?
  
  I shall have no quiet time after this hunting;
  But brief and violent.
  
  Let me go now.
  
  " He answered,
  "I know what love is, I saw it in the devil's tie-pin.
  
  How dared you come down undressed?
  
  " She saw him shaking
  In the candle-light, and thought with a thread ravelled
  From her mind's gathering fire-mist, "You poor good fool,
  Is it there with you?
  
  " He said, "Horrible dreams of love
  Like splintered glass in my bed cut me all night, like a splintered
  mirror.
  
  Reave betrayed you with that pale bright doll.
  
  " He came from
  the doorway toward her, then Helen laughed and dipped
  Her hand in a half sack of barley on the shelf, and felt the kernels
  light and luxuriously
  Lie in her fingers, and said through white lips:
  "Is this the poison-soaked
  grain?
  
  that makes the squirrels cry
  In the quiet of their little caves, that bitter death?
  
  " "Let it alone.
  
  Oh, this place crawls with death,
  Traps, guns, knives, poisons: but no one sleeps near, no one can
  bear us.
  
  There's a bright wanting beast in me:
  Hunt that, Helen.
  
  Kill that.
  
  I thought love
  Was kindness, it's a blind burning beast.
  
  Oh, wait: because I
  heard voices and answered them, saw spirits and feared
  them,
  You and the rest were whispering that I was crazy.
  
  Why, that
  was nothing.
  
  But now, when I burn to tear
  That last white rag from you, and do-how can I say it?
  
  striking
  the obscene parts of our flesh together
  This is the real thing, this is the madness.
  
  " She laughed and ran
  her fingers through the deadly barley and answered:
  "Yours is a common trouble, we'd manage you a kind cure
  If I were liberal; but you'd loathe me for it, and my winter's come.
  
  I wish to leave my poor spotted memory
  A little lonely and distinct at this bitter end.
  
  Is it nearly morning?
  
  "
  "Do you think .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " he answered, and suddenly
  The pallor of his face gleamed with a film of sweat, he said "I've
  fooled myself out of life for fancy
  Feelings and second-hand noble dreams.
  
  Kill all the deer on the
  mountain, what's that to me?
  
  I've seen them
  Go to it like dogs in the bushes outside the cantonment: wise
  soldiers: did you think you could come naked
  And not be mauled?
  
  " She said furiously,
  "You fool," and heard him hiss when he touched her breast and
  cry:
  "The lids of your eyes are swollen, your eyes are knives.
  
  This is it.
  
  Yes.
  
  " His teeth clattered together so that she thought
  of a crooked stone the returning
  Wave sucks, and the stone rolls over and over, clashing on the
  pebbles.
  
  He wiped his forehead with his hand and shook
  The fingers as if blood hung on them, saying, "That Hester's
  gone.
  
  I might have had a second-hand .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Noble thought very likely.
  
  Tell the audience for all those cat-calls there's not one of them
  But's more or less in my manner
  Done out of his dear life by scrupulous cowardices.
  
  Men ought to ravage: then down comes the black curtain,
  We died like old empty priests.
  
  " But Helen seeing him
  All shrunken again, "Believe me," she said in pity,
  "These rosy toys you’ve missed make a bad bargain
  At the time of the end.
  
  I could be very envious
  Of virgins and a quiet life.
  
  " "The two you’ve had
  Are nothing," he answered, "take two hundred.
  
  But only
  Beware not to make a baby, we know what life is:
  That mercy's weakness, and honesty
  The simple fear of detection; and beauty, paint;
  And love, a furious longing to join the sewers of two bodies.
  
  That's how God made us and the next wars
  Will swallow up all.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Helen, I'm very tired
  With cloudy thoughts, and have been fearful at times
  Of falling into some unclearness of mind.
  
  That would be bad: lunacy's worse than death.
  
  If I should consider taking a certain remedy
  While I'm still sane, to scour the rancid bowl
  Back to its first brightness, who could be blamed?
  
  You've always been kind beyond words.
  
  "
  He went, and Helen
  At once forgot him, all her energy reverting
  To its old preoccupation like a freed spring,
  She took the rifle to hide it below her mattress
  And barefoot stilly went up through the house.
  
  She passed Reave's door.
  
  And returned again to listen whether he moaned
  Or slept.
  
  No sound appeared, but wind or the ocean
  Whispering high over the house.
  
  In that silence
  Her intention flowered; she became calm, convinced
  That time had come to cut all the knots at once
  And lead the agonies of strain to a sharp end.
  
  Mark's outcry, though she forgot him, had tired her,
  The resistances of a drained spirit faint
  Before the power does, she had lost the strength not to act
  And stealthily unlatched the door.
  
  It seemed clear, plain
  And reasonable, to seal that heavy sleep
  From ever waking to worse; but having planted
  The candle upon the chest by the door, and drawing
  Down the steel barrel the three points to one line,
  She met his eyes wide open, broad and inhuman, like the universal
  eyes of night, judging
  And damning her act, with remote absolute merciless comprehension.
  
  She was like a touched sleepwalker,
  Unnerved and annihilated: what contemptible
  Distraction had made the reasons of her dream?
  
  and Reave:
  "Come closer.
  
  You'd botch it from there, and I'd be days
  Dying or not, cursing you for a fool.
  
  "
  She leaned and shuffled toward him.
  
  She felt her neck
  Wrenched by the buffet, and lukewarm blood wandering
  From her mouth down the left side of her throat and tasted
  The thick salt sweetness, and Reave saying furiously, "Sneak in
  behind me
  Fighting on my last inch?
  
  I never struck you before, you earned
  it enough.
  
  " She mumbled,
  "It doesn't hurt .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "Trust you," he said, "to side with my
  enemy.
  
  " His great hands, and the white knuckles
  Like peaks among the black hairs, blazed in the lit center of
  the orbital darknesses that hooded her eyes.
  
  His hands had her little rifle and were strained to break it, but the
  great strength that she believed could do anything
  Failed after all.
  
  Snapping and whining with pain like a wounded
  dog he shifted over on his elbows
  And thrust the barrel under the board of the bedside, drew up
  against his own weight, and the splitting stock
  Ripped from the steel.
  
  "That's yours," he said gasping.
  
  "Go call
  Luna.
  
  " She felt the pain of her lips swelling,
  Cut on the dog-tooth edge, and the blood on her throat, and
  muttered, "It doesn't hurt.
  
  " "You red and white
  Barber's-pole," he said, "fetch Johnny Luna.
  
  We'll have a disarmament here.
  
  " "What?
  
  " "Light the lamp and take
  Your light and fetch him.
  
  " "What?
  
  Oh, oh!" she cowered and
  knelt down against the bedside, "don't send me away.
  
  I'll promise never .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I promise .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " "You'll not be sent away,
  I'll not let you go.
  
  " "How could I sleep,"
  She prayed, not hearing him, "or lie down, or live, in another
  place, not knowing
  How you were, and never see you nor touch you?
  
  " "You lie,"
  he groaned, "or you're changed.
  
  Be sure I'll not let you go.
  
  I am not changed.
  
  "
  She clenched a fold of the coverlet and stammered, "I am not changed.
  
  I was only ignorant.
  
  When the idiot body and perverse
  Imagination went whoring .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  then still whatever it is
  That loves was weeping here.
  
  "
  Reave's old mother
  Stood in the door, her corded bare throat thrust
  From the fold of a brown cloak, and dull-white wisps
  Starring her head; the noise of the broken gun-stock
  Had beckoned her from a dream.
  
  "Praying is she?
  
  Religion's
  Their last trick .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " She saw the blood-streak, and blazing
  Went and dragged up Helen's face, one hand in the hair,
  One at her throat, saying "What have you done, you .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  It's your own, is it?
  
  That's better.
  
  " Reave said, "Let her alone.
  
  I called and she came running asleep, in the dark,
  She struck her face.
  
  " The old woman looked down the candlelight
  At the rifle-barrel and the splintered stock, and said,
  "You are still strong.
  
  " "But can't run my own errands.
  
  Wash yourself," he said to Helen; "light the lamp;
  Go and call Johnny.
  
  "
  When Helen was gone, the old mother:
  "Tell me what she was doing.
  
  " He rolled his shoulders
  And groaned, striking his hand down at his thigh.
  
  "Would you believe this fixed and passive flesh
  Has red hot wire in it?
  
  What nights.
  
  " "Why have you sent for Luna
  At midnight?
  
  " "To amuse me awhile.
  
  Get to bed, mother,
  Before the aching night strikes to your bones.
  
  I had an inflamed throat
  After that fall of rain, all my discomforts
  Turned fiery then.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Oh, if you need, I'll tell you.
  
  We've rifles and a shotgun, but nobody
  Will ever go hunting from here again, and to save oiling
  He's to break the guns.
  
  They call it disarmament.
  
  I dreamed
  The old dog that was your husband and my father
  Stood in a cave-mouth calling; and, to speak exactly,
  I'll not be tempted.
  
  "
  XVIII
  The house in the deep gorge
  Had been darkened again.
  
  One of those night-birds that cry in
  quickening rhythm like the rattle of a spun plate falling
  Cried, then the silver streak southeast loosed a slight moon.
  
  A few
  of the house-windows feebly glittered
  Back its horned light; the massed black obelisks of redwood
  utterly ignored it, but the leafless leaning sycamore
  Shone like a trunked and branched moon on the dark wood,
  a tree made wholly of luminous lunar material,
  Except one long hanging shadow.
  
  The clouds took the moon
  again, the sycamore vanished, the dream in the eyes
  Of the house died; and imperceptibly a twilight began to exist,
  without wind or color, or foam
  Of a formal cloud, but misty rain fell.
  
  A faintly more curded
  mist-wreath flowed from a chimney and down
  The house-roof valleys, it spread earthling dissolving, and sensitive
  wild nostrils up the great gorge
  Tasted the oak-smoke and coffee fragrance of a waking house.
  
  The world lightened, the rain increased.
  
  A broad brown face peered from a window, a woman whose
  blood had known this coast for ten thousand years
  Perceived a strangeness of shape in that moony sycamore.
  
  She
  had work in hand, but an hour later she poured
  Coffee for Mark Thurso, who'd not come down yet, and set it
  with his egg back of the stove and went
  To empty the grounds into the willows.
  
  She hooded her head
  against the rain with an apron, but returning
  Saw the sycamore framed in the apron-fold
  And it looked dreadful.
  
  She approached and found Mark hanging
  Long-necked, very wet with rain.
  
  She stood at some distance,
  Mournfully, with the coffee-pot in her hand,
  Thinking the grounds were bad for chickens, but this
  Rainy morning she might have mixed them with the other leavings,
  Not gone out, and seen nothing.
  
  She went and washed plates and cups,
  Wishing for Johnny, but he was busy in the barn.
  
  The rain fell on the barn roof, the rain fell .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  everywhere .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And no one could sleep: smashing rifles all night.
  
  Old Mrs.
  
  Thurso went in and out; Olvidia
  Trembled each time, but after going to the privy
  Was more composed in her mind.
  
  The soft beneficent rain hung
  on the hills without flowing down
  And filled the soil to the rock, all it could hold; it lay on the
  shore, it sweetened the bitter sea,
  It dripped from every bough of the forest, and from the feet of
  the dead man and his hands and his chin,
  It glazed his pale-blue face, and glazed the great seaward rock-face
  of Thurso's Landing, and each green leaf
  And grass-blade south by the coast to Point Conception; and
  north into Oregon; so long an island of cloud,
  Blinding white above, dark and dove-purple below, rained on
  a thousand miles of the continent's edge;
  The old savage brood-mare, the earth, drank strength and forgot
  her deserts.
  
  Helen Thurso
  Walked in Reave's room and looked out the window, and the
  ivory tree
  Seemed to have borne in the rain enormous fruit.
  
  She covered her mouth, through incredulous fear feeling
  The bulge of her bruised lip, and left the room
  Silently; she met Reave's mother carrying a white
  Bundle of linen that glimmered down the dark passage,
  And said, "Have you seen Mark?
  
  " She answered jealously
  "What do you want?
  
  " "Oh, oh.
  
  If he's in his room.
  
  I was thinking about the rain, I haven't seen him this morning.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  My eyes are sick.
  
  " She passed and felt the smell
  Of the freshly ironed linen mix with her fear,
  And came to Olvidia in the hot kitchen
  Stroking the iron on the board.
  
  "Come to the door
  For God's sake, for the windows are blind with rain.
  
  In the sycamore tree?
  
  " The Indian hung back, mumbling
  "Might 'a' been a mountain-lion or a big hawk," and Helen
  Dragged her by the wrist, but the old mother
  Had followed and heard, and when they came to the door
  She was at the foot of the tree.
  
  They heard her cry
  Three times, a dry scream more goshawk's than woman's.
  
  Helen breathed and said "Reave has heard that.
  
  I .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Get a knife.
  
  " She ran to the tree; where Mark's mother
  Stood stiffly quiet by the grotesque legs
  And said, "I can't reach.
  
  He is the one I loved.
  
  "
  Helen began to clamber at the tree, her knees
  Slipping on the wet bark and her fingers
  On the ivory bough, the old woman said harshly, "Make no
  show of yourself.
  
  He's been long dead and will not admire you.
  
  This one is mine,
  my servants will help me.
  
  Stand off, you.
  
  "
  Helen looked back at her face and saw Olvidia and Luna coming;
  she looked at the dead man's face
  And said, "Oh, good-bye," and looked down quickly.
  
  "I will go
  to Reave," she said trembling.
  
  She went to his room.
  
  The bed-covers were trailed on the floor and he at the window
  Hung like a broken snake, his hands on the sill lifting his head
  to the glass.
  
  He turned toward her,
  Wrinkled like a fighting mastiff with rage and pain, saying "That
  dead dog.
  
  " She shivering and shrill cried out
  "No!" but he said, "The dead dog that walks in the wood, that
  he used to talk to, has done this: too shot with cowardice
  To live, and too envious to let his sons.
  
  Praising death.
  
  Oh my
  poor brother,
  If you lived in the hell of pain and impotence
  That I inhabit, yet you oughtn't to have yielded.
  
  It was something
  to see the envy slaver with hunger
  And not be fed.
  
  " Then Helen said faintly,
  half borne into belief
  by Reave's passion, "Oh, have you seen him?
  
  "
  The great strained shoulders began to fail, the hooked fingers to
  slip on the painted sill, "Felt him," he said,
  Angularly falling.
  
  Unable to lift his weight, she dragged it
  To the side of the bed, and heaved up the dead half
  Of his body, and he the living.
  
  She fell over against him
  In the strain of lifting, his violent hands held her
  Like a lover's, hurting her breasts against his ribs, she felt a
  ghastliness in him
  But forced her charged nerves to make no resistance
  And kissed his cheek with her bruised mouth, the hardening
  Muscles of his jaw hurt that.
  
  "Fool," he said hoarsely.
  
  "Have you forgotten?
  
  You'll have to learn to endure
  A starved life for a hot woman.
  
  " She stood up
  And saw his lips bluish and compressed and his eyes blunted.
  
  "Our loves now,
  Ah," he said, "a little too heavy.
  
  A wrench of pain
  For the consummation.
  
  Pain is the solidest thing in the world, it has hard edges,
  I think it has a shape and might be handled,
  Like a rock worn with flat sides and edges, harder than rock, but
  Like love it can hardly last more than fifty years.
  
  Mark is dead.
  
  He'd not have yielded in his right mind.
  
  Go help my mother.
  
  " Helen said, "She drove me away.
  
  He was always faithful and kind.
  
  Oh, oh, what shore
  Are we sailing toward, with such wrecks for the sea-marks?
  
  Dear, you didn't dream I meant to outlive you?
  
  Our poor brother
  Did very wisely though I wish .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I can hardly remember
  The time when death used to seem terrible to me:
  I've worse fears now.
  
  But if the whole world should be burned alive.
  
  Our brother, whom we loved well, is safe.
  
  "
  XIX
  Reave sighed,
  And said, "Go and tell her to send Luna.
  
  He'll have to ride to Lobos, there's no telephone
  Nearer.
  
  To let the coroner know.
  
  Oh God, why bother?
  
  I used to have legs and do my own business.
  
  Do you believe in a God?
  
  " "I didn't use to.
  
  "
  "Well?
  
  Now do you?
  
  " "We've less reason to.
  
  Yes.
  
  There's not a tinge of goodness in the whole world,
  But war in my mind and agony in yours, and darkness
  Over the sea and the heights and all bright spirits
  Forsake the earth.
  
  We've excellent cause
  To know there's none: but there is.
  
  " "Go to church then.
  
  A torturer then.
  
  " He wiped his forehead and said,
  "Another dead dog to bite us.
  
  What, that sits calmly
  Above the stars, and sees the old woman lose both her sons for
  nothing, one in a dirty noose
  And the other like a broken stick on a dung-hill; then smiles over
  the sea to China on a million people
  Dying of hunger, the lucky ones sold their children for tufts of
  grass and die with green teeth, God pats
  His baby hands together and looks down pleasantly.
  
  No, the
  world's not so comic as that: I'll tell you
  What the world's like: like a stone for no reason falling in the
  night from a cliff in the hills, that makes a lonely
  Noise and a spark in the hollow darkness, and nobody sees and
  nobody cares.
  
  There's nothing good in it
  Except the courage in us not to be beaten.
  
  It can't make us
  Cringe or say please.
  
  " "Dear," she answered,
  "Where would the weakness be in kicking off a random and senseless
  Darkness like that?
  
  Strength doesn't suffer for nothing,
  Strength would refuse to suffer for nothing, but choose its times
  To live or die.
  
  " "Listen," he said; "there's a silver spoon
  With my initials on it in a drawer somewhere.
  
  When I was five years old I saw my father
  Use it in his mouth: I never would touch it again.
  
  No doubt it stinks.
  
  " Tenderly she answered,
  "You have great hands: I love you: kill me first,
  And then eat with my spoon.
  
  It would be wine and honey,
  Oh sweet, sweet, after this life.
  
  " He laughed angrily
  And moaned and said, "Let's talk sense if we talk.
  
  I'll not have him buried here and put him forever
  In the black dog's power: superstitious as you:
  To Monterey, some old graveyard
  Where decent people are lying beside each other
  And a rose turns from the sea.
  
  ".
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Mother," he said,
  She entering the room, "your loss is hard.
  
  There's nothing.
  
  We must take our pain and live in it.
  
  " Her eyes
  More like dry flints than ever, "Can you read this,"
  She said, holding a rag of sodden paper,
  "My sight fails, and the rain has washed it, pinned to his coat.
  
  "
  She gave it to Reave, he holding it against the light
  Said wearily, "Read it, Helen.
  
  " Sick pencil-marks
  On death-cold paper: she read in a brittle voice:
  "I fear insanity.
  
  Forgive this ugly sight,
  Dribbling and screeching would be an uglier sight,
  Or to do something worse.
  
  Oh, why did you go away,
  Why did you come back?
  
  My only cause for this act is fear of madness.
  
  That must be stated clearly.
  
  No other cause.
  
  Dear love,
  Come soon, this room is purer.
  
  " Helen's voice fainted on the
  final words.
  
  She fixed her eyes on the old mother's and said,
  "It was written to you.
  
  " Who answered harshly, "I did not go
  away nor come back.
  
  Her tricks of nature
  Have made their misery again.
  
  I never hated her enough.
  
  " Helen,
  without moving: "How could I care
  Who hates me or not, when I think about him writing that in
  the night?
  
  He often made notes for thoughts
  With a stub pencil," she bit her lip not to weep, and suddenly
  the tears rained down.
  
  The old mother: "Ah, Reave?
  
  We have to face it: she fished for him too.
  
  If I'd married a
  stronger man my sons might have outlived me,
  But a woman from nowhere comes and burns you like wax.
  
  Give me that paper.
  
  " Helen gave it and the wet slip
  Tore in the taking.
  
  Reave said, "Snatch, sea-gull.
  
  Be a little quiet
  over my head, pain's worn me thin,
  And Mark's dead in the house.
  
  We're sorry for you,
  Mother.
  
  As for that message, it has no meaning but the pity in
  it.
  
  " The old woman looked young, with the angry
  Color on her cheek-bones; Helen looked aged and pale, saying,
  "Very likely it is quite true that I brought
  Misery in both my hands, unwillingly.
  
  I am much to be blamed
  for all our miseries.
  
  I can bear it.
  
  But while the night darkens, and God closes his hand on this
  house, and there's no help, I might do well at last
  What you can't do.
  
  After that I'll submit meekly, whether you
  wish to punish me or please to say
  Some merciful thing.
  
  "
  Reave opened his eyes and said,
  "Mark's not to be buried here, this is the dog's ditch.
  
  He'd 'a' lived long if he hadn't walked in the woods.
  
  If you have to sell horses to buy a grave to the north, there's a
  little colt
  That has no name, I'm fond of him, I rode him before the fall.
  
  "
  His mother stared, saying "Who buys horses?
  
  "
  He answered, "He's not for sale, I'll not have it.
  
  I hunted the
  desert for him
  When he strayed, and brought him back.
  
  Are you all ganged
  against me
  With the devil in the woods?
  
  " The old woman touched him and said,
  "Reave.
  
  Nobody will sell your horses.
  
  There's no buyer.
  
  You're tired.
  
  " He answered, "Not tired: but to say it plainly:
  In hell, in hell.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I have talked foolishness.
  
  I can bear twice as much.
  
  Go back to Mark, mother.
  
  He needs .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  I remember.
  
  " The women stood side by side
  Gazing at his locked face, the mother weaving
  Her thin hands together, having that rainy paper
  Crushed between the two palms, but Helen stone still; then Reave
  Drew down the lids over his staring eyes
  And made a thin careful smile.
  
  The old woman suddenly
  Sighed and went out.
  
  Reave drew loud breath and his eyes
  Opened, fastened on Helen's: "Don't let her come in again.
  
  I'd hate to tell her.
  
  She's much to be pitied too.
  
  Never let her
  know," he said craftily,
  "That she's the cause.
  
  She lay with my enemy, all springs from
  that.
  
  I believe you'd never dream it, to look at her,
  She'd do such things.
  
  Has it cleared?
  
  " She stammered "What
  what?
  
  " "Go to the window," he said, "and look out, and see
  Whether the rain has stopped yet.
  
  " She went and said, "No.
  
  "
  "It is clearing eastward?
  
  " "All dark.
  
  Some wind moves
  The sky-ridge trees.
  
  " "Rain or not"; and after a moment, "Did
  you notice anything," he said, "Helen, disordered
  In what I said lately?
  
  " "I know you suffer
  Overpowering pain at times.
  
  " "Hm?
  
  Not a bit.
  
  Firm as a rock.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Listen, Helen:
  My pride and I have agreed: I can bear this punishment,
  But I don't have to.
  
  " She thought he had yielded and was willing
  to die;
  That he was beaten seemed to be breaking her heart, that he
  would die terrified her, that his useless pain
  Would find its goal in peace was a great sheaf of good; so three
  ways stricken, white and faint: and the undertow
  Unconscious enmity that never died from her mind tearing her
  too with its exultation: "Oh,"
  She whispered, "what change?
  
  " "Why should I refuse the means
  to relieve it?
  
  "
  He said defiantly.
  
  "I'm like in the sea's gut here,
  Weighed down with tons of green thick water: while above the air's
  Clean and alive.
  
  We're too closed-in here.
  
  " He paused,
  His eyes glassed and hands clenched.
  
  "A twinge.
  
  Don't imagine
  I'm running from the dead dog: we'll make a bonfire
  Of his platforms on the rock-head some night.
  
  That's my one point in life now: to clean out
  Trace and shape and smell of him and leave the canyon
  Virgin if fire and dynamite can do it.
  
  In summer when the ground hardens we'll slash
  A driveway up to the kilns and blow them clean
  By the foundations.
  
  Have you told him yet?
  
  " "What?
  
  " she asked.
  
  "What! bring it to the door.
  
  " "Dear, I'm dull with sadness,
  I can't see to your mind.
  
  " "Have I not told you
  Three times already?
  
  The truck, the truck, the motor-truck.
  
  The thing that runs on four wheels.
  
  Tell him tell Luna
  To bring it to the door and help you load on your cripple,
  So I'll taste air to-day.
  
  " "Where?
  
  " "Where it's widest,
  And the ocean and hills are clear to be seen,
  On the Landing: the rock-head: up there.
  
  " "Oh, Oh, that's in the sky.
  
  That's well thought.
  
  " She trembled violently and said,
  "I'll do my part.
  
  It's noon:
  First you must eat, though Mark's dead in the house.
  
  Then we'll go up to the rock.
  
  It seems long
  Since morning.
  
  " He said, "To-morrow they'll need the motor
  To take my brother .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  who has died, as you say.
  
  Akh, do
  quickly,"
  XX
  "You'll need the jack and a shovel, Johnny Luna,
  For the ground's rotten with rain; and an axe
  For brushwood no doubt has grown up in the old road.
  
  Yet another thing:
  There was a man named Rick Armstrong: do you remember?
  
  He's dead quite lately.
  
  He died too.
  
  The world's
  Full of that kind of thing.
  
  " She pressed her hand
  On the reeling pulse in her throat and said, "I'll tell you.
  
  He drove too fast at the Salinas River bridge,
  Suddenly his sins came on him and swerved the wheel
  Over the concrete, he rolled with his car
  And got his life bumped out in the willow-bushes.
  
  Do you understand?
  
  It will please my husband,
  For he was his bitter enemy: but if I told him
  I might not be believed.
  
  I am very anxious to make him feel .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  contentment
  Before he .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  sleeps, because he suffers great pain
  And has no joy nor hope.
  
  Johnny, you'll help me
  For love of him, and I'll give you this ring besides.
  
  I wore it through all my ventures, bought long ago
  With money I earned.
  
  I paid twelve dollars for it,
  You can get three no doubt: the stone's nothing,
  But the hoop's gold.
  
  Take it please.
  
  I've nothing else of any priceable value
  Except my marriage ring: I'll die in that,
  Though stained, some acid.
  
  What you must do is, tell him
  About Rick Armstrong's death, as I told it to you,
  To make him happier; but say the Vasquez boys
  Told you, not I.
  
  Everyone's talking about it,
  He was well known on the coast; he worked, you know,
  With the road-builders.
  
  Mind the jack and the spade,
  And the hand-axe: he's half mad with pain
  Or he'd not want to go up.
  
  Why, the rain's stopped,"
  She said, and sobbed once and smiled.
  
  "That's a grand sign.
  
  Ah don't forget how Rick Armstrong died.
  
  "
  XXI
  Reave's mother heard
  The motor stammer to the house-door, and spin and stop.
  
  She
  stood up beside her own bed,
  On which she had had her dearest laid down, and had never
  ceased to arrange the body, to make it seem
  Happily asleep if she could; having dried it with a warm towel
  and washed the rain-stains, and dressed her son
  In clean night-clothes, covering the throat: she looked at the
  bed with unmoistened eyes like a mother falcon,
  And went downstairs to the door; Luna was entering.
  
  "Who
  ordered this?
  
  Take it back to the shed.
  
  He will stay in my house with me to-night: if we go to-morrow
  To another place, 7 will tell you, not that woman.
  
  " Helen came
  while she spoke, and Luna
  Looked from her face to hers, as a boatman
  From the rock shore to the driving sea.
  
  Helen said, "We must
  take the bedding first, it is ready.
  
  "
  The old mother: "You're very confident suddenly.
  
  You think
  you've made enough wretchedness to break my mind and
  make you
  Commander here.
  
  " Helen, vaguely, in her own thought snared:
  "What?
  
  No.
  
  Is a wind blowing, the trees on the cloud
  Look hunched: and all my strength's gone: Oh mother,
  Tell Reave to wait! Comfort him.
  
  " "Reave?
  
  " She turned and
  went toward his room, then Helen remembered that suddenly
  He seemed to dislike his mother: "Don't go in to Reave:
  Oh, I was wrong," and followed her; and Luna followed
  The two women.
  
  Helen said to Luna: "Take out the mattress
  and the covers: we'll have to go.
  
  " The old mother
  To Reave: "You called for that?
  
  Did you tell me you were going
  somewhere,
  And I missed hearing?
  
  " His eyes avoided her, he answered:
  "I'm going to the head of the rock to smell the rain.
  
  Why not?
  
  I can't make Mark live
  By smothering here.
  
  " "The rock?
  
  " "Uh, what y' call the Landing.
  
  I believe the air's free there.
  
  " He closed his eyes
  And fists, and smiled.
  
  Helen said sharply to Luna:
  "The little package is mine: let it lie, I’ll take it.
  
  Bread and meat.
  
  " Reave's mother looked back and saw
  Her throat shuddering and swallowing as strained with sickness
  At the thought of food.
  
  "Why: how long are you staying up
  there?
  
  "
  "While our .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  the light lasts," she answered, and swallowed,
  and said,
  "Olvidia's here if you need anything.
  
  " The mother:
  "Reave.
  
  This is not in your line, to run off from trouble.
  
  She leads you I think.
  
  " "Run?
  
  " He rolled his head on the thick
  neck.
  
  "Run,
  To a man with no legs.
  
  And she leads me: you are very greedy
  to make humiliation perfect, ah?
  
  I might have a grudge too .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  wi' that dog .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  ugh.
  
  Mother, mother:
  You endure something and so do I: but bodily pain is ignoble
  and soils the mind.
  
  If ever
  I should talk wildly .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  no danger: I can bear much more than
  anything yet .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  you'll not take it to heart,
  Put it aside as just foam and nothing.
  
  I love you and respect you,
  and when you are bitter with me I know
  How life has used you.
  
  About the other thing: have you ever known me to turn back
  from something begun?
  
  I've grown touchy,
  But not all changed.
  
  " "In this raw air," she answered,
  "In the likely rain to go up: you told me your trouble turned
  fiery after a rain.
  
  " "I am ashamed,"
  He said dully, "to leave you in sorrow.
  
  I can do nothing here,
  not even walk to Mark's room.
  
  A man like me, crippled out of use, hurt out of patience and so forth,
  May's well go picnics.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  D'y' see that star?
  
  " "What?
  
  " "The
  star.
  
  " "There's no star, Reave.
  
  " He drew his hand
  Over his eyes and said, "No star?
  
  None?
  
  Oh, yes there is.
  
  Thousands, but in the house we can't see them.
  
  Well, Helen.
  
  Move me, ah?
  
  March.
  
  "
  That frame of redwood sticks
  And canvas was laid on the bed against him, Reave shifted
  The living part of his body onto it, the others
  The lower part.
  
  Helen saw his jaws locked
  Not to express pain, she heard the breath
  Hiss through his nostrils, and thought that she must detach
  Her nerves from feeling with his, or all her remnant
  Of strength to help him would bleed away to no purpose: but a
  superstitious
  Fear forbade any restraint of sympathy,
  It looked too much like betrayal; and Reave might suffer
  Some mystic loss.
  
  She took one of the whittled
  Litter-handles, the old woman another, and Luna
  The two at Reave's feet; so they conveyed him forth
  And edged him onto the truck-floor.
  
  He felt his mother's
  Eyes probe him, then to cover pain and the shame
  Of helplessness: "You ought to rig up a mast
  And tackle," he muttered with flat dry lips,
  "To hoist your deck-load aboard.
  
  " "Reave, for God's sake,"
  Helen cried.
  
  "What?
  
  " he said.
  
  "Ships are bad luck I think.
  
  "
  "Fool.
  
  " "Yes"; and she said panting, "Oh, you're quite right,
  Call it a ship.
  
  I'll sit on the deck beside you.
  
  Our lives are taken away from luck and given
  Higher.
  
  " The old woman looked at her lifted face
  And began fiercely to speak, and looked at Reave's, and clutched
  The broken board-ends of the floor of the truck
  By his feet, where the steel binding was sprung.
  
  "I will stay with Mark,"
  She said harshly.
  
  "It's been promoted," Helen said,
  "From being the barge for calves to the butcher.
  
  Now .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " The mother: "I think, Reave, this woman
  Is faithful now.
  
  " "A ship," Helen said, "exploring
  The open ocean of pain to try if there's any
  Shore.
  
  " "You have not the courage," she answered.
  
  "But as you deal with Reave I will deal with you,
  And twice as much.
  
  I have nothing to hold me.
  
  " She turned to
  the house
  And the car moved; before she came to the door-step
  She fell down in the path; but no one saw her,
  For Helen looked at Reave, Reave at the sky,
  And Luna drove.
  
  The old woman dragged her hands
  Through the wet earth and stood up, lifting her yellow
  Asturine face: as when a goshawk is caught in a steel trap at a
  pole's end,
  That was feathered with a bird for bait, and the farmer comes
  with death in his hands and takes down the pole, she turns
  In the steel teeth and outstares her captor with harder eyes.
  
  Pitching and slipping on stones
  And greasy earth, the truck toiled up the farmlane; Helen
  watched the lines in Reave's face, and risings
  Of muscle in his cheek when he locked his jaws when a jolt
  racked him.
  
  Once, when the fore-wheels and then the rear
  Struck in succession and Reave's lips tightened, she laid her
  hand on his fist: "That was the cable," she said,
  And wished that she had kept silence; and said, "It lies in the
  canyon mud like a killed snake: your enemy
  Was under your wheels.
  
  " But whether he heard her or not he
  made no sign.
  
  At the turn to the county road
  Mill creek is bridged; the stream ran full, on the bridge was a
  whirlwind funnel of sucks and splinters, then Helen
  Looked up the redwoods and saw the racing sky, and a ray of sun
  plunge like a sword, cut northward,
  And be withdrawn.
  
  They climbed the cliff-cut zig-zag stair of
  the road; when they neared the crest
  The blanket streamed up, stripped from Reave's feet, and Helen
  With a sudden sea-gull cry caught it down again
  And said "Oh, Reave!" as if waked from a dream
  That drove toward some unbearable end.
  
  "We can't
  Go out to the rock, but if you can bear it
  We'll go on farther than that, we'll go on to town.
  
  The doctor will have to do .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  at least something
  To still your pain.
  
  " "All the opium in India.
  
  Brought low enough without that"; he muttered more,
  But the streaming wind took it away, then Helen:
  "Oh Reave be merciful: spare me once.
  
  We couldn't tell that the storm was stripping the high places
  When we planned this, down below, I can't bear it.
  
  " The wind
  tilted the truck on the steep springs
  When it gained the crest and turned quartering; Reave struck
  the floor with his hand, holding his body with the other to
  stay it
  From rolling, and groaned, "I guess you can bear it.
  
  " "You don't
  know," she said,
  "What stands on the rock .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  " she stoppered her mouth with
  her knuckles against the teeth, and breathed through them,
  and said,
  "You have no mercy: your choice is wise.
  
  Here is the gate.
  
  "
  XXII
  At the cliff-line, in the lee of one of those heavily
  Timbered platforms on the very brow, from which the lime-kegs
  used to be slung to the ship's hold,
  They rested at length; but only the cripple's insane invincible
  stubbornness had brought them to it, by the gullied
  Overgrown road.
  
  A broken shed on the staging, long ago unroofed
  by some former storm,
  Still offered a brittle screen of standing planks, splintered, singing
  in the wind; Thurso's companions
  Laid him in that shelter on the sea-brow platform.
  
  He gathered
  and governed pain in a long silence, and said,
  "Did you see that riffraff under the floor, in the joists and
  braces?
  
  "
  "What?
  
  " Helen said dimly.
  
  "Sticks and grass: wood-rats' nests.
  
  Kindling.
  
  When this spell of rain ends
  We've only to drop a match and all the platform
  Flies into ashes: while Luna pries the old engine-boiler
  Down the cliff into the sea: we'll have our rock-head
  Clean as at first.
  
  " She answered, "Oh: that?
  
  " and shivered
  In the whirl of the broken wind, saying, "Reave: listen.
  
  Do you think he minds?
  
  " "Hm?
  
  " "Your father.
  
  Because if he
  Lives after his death, envying and doing evil,
  Then death, that I have always been sick with fear
  To think of, is not an end, and you and I
  Might look down at our lives laughing
  From a great height.
  
  " "Dead as a dog," he said.
  
  "I never thought anything else.
  
  Grieving for Mark
  I may’ve talked foolishly.
  
  We'll erase his leavings
  For pleasure and to clean the world.
  
  " "You don't know.
  
  7 don't know.
  
  They won't tell," she said grievously.
  
  "Another man, Reave, is dead also.
  
  They fall and fall
  Like apples in a wind.
  
  Johnny Luna told me.
  
  " She stood up
  And called Luna from prying at the truck's mudguard,
  Where it was bent to the tire by a stump of oak,
  "Was it the Vasquez boys that told you?
  
  " she screamed
  Down the loud wind.
  
  Luna climbed up the platform
  And stood with his blank slate face bent from the storm,
  Saying "What you want?
  
  " "I was so troubled this morning,
  I hardly listened to you: didn't you tell me
  Armstrong was killed?
  
  " He nodded gravely, and Helen:
  "I'm glad.
  
  Are you glad, Reave?
  
  " "No.
  
  Rick Armstrong?
  
  "
  He said groaning, turning himself on his shoulders,
  "How did Rick Armstrong die?
  
  " "All in a minute,"
  She answered, "how was it?
  
  In his car, Johnny?
  
  "
  "He drive too fast at the bridge.
  
  " "When was that?
  
  " Reeve said.
  
  "I don' know.
  
  Maybe las' week.
  
  Vidal Vasquez
  He talking about.
  
  " Reave said, "It's too bad.
  
  He was a good fellow: but the single fault
  I've never understood yet.
  
  Well.
  
  Time and chance.
  
  " Helen, suddenly
  shaking like the erect boards
  Behind her in the wind: "Is it nothing, nothing to you?
  
  It was
  something to me! Hush.
  
  I'll be still.
  
  I hoped
  You'd feel an old debt paid, and be pleased, and I'd
  Be dearer to you.
  
  He's dead, you understand?
  
  He's gone down.
  
  You live.
  
  " Reave gazed up in slight wonder; Helen sighed
  And turned to Luna: "That's all.
  
  Thank you for lying.
  
  It was
  no good.
  
  " The Indian went carefully down,
  And back to the car, clinging by the platform timbers in the
  current of wind.
  
  Helen crouched again
  On the planks beside Reave's mattress, she kept jerking her hands
  together and drawing them apart; the screen
  Of boards behind her whistled and clapped like something heard
  on a ship; the ragged skies and wreaths
  Of mist rushed by, and crescent-moon-shaped flurries of foam
  on the streaked sea; the rock and the platform
  Were driving up wind with dreadful increasing speed, the deck
  and the hull.
  
  She moistened her lips to whisper
  Silently: "Mark's out of it.
  
  Oh happy, Oh happy! but the racing
  engines
  Will burst with this.
  
  Is the time now?
  
  "
  Reave never slept, he
  lay and looked up with broad light eyes
  At the driven sky; the upper eyelids cut the blue circles, the
  lower missed them; his face was motionless
  Like worn hard wood, but all the while he felt pain.
  
  It was hateful
  of him to leave the duty to a woman;
  Lie there fallen; wait to be saved; what had they come up for!
  And when she killed her lover to please him
  He had not cared.
  
  She turned herself toward the clattering
  boards and undid the package,
  And turned again, holding the things in her hands,
  Hidden in her lap.
  
  The engine in her side was quieter,
  But the ship glided dreadfully faster, giddy with speed.
  
  She swayed upright and went around him to approach him
  From the north side, so that her right hand
  Was under his chin when she knelt down and kissed,
  And babbling something of love drew his own sharp hunting-knife
  Between the jaw and the jut of cartilage, with such
  Hoarded unconscious violence that both the arteries,
  And the tubes between them, and much of the muscle sheath
  On the right of the throat were severed; his head jerked to the left,
  The great wound gaped and sighed, all in a moment
  Mattress and blanket, the planks, the whole world of sense,
  Were painted with blood and foam.
  
  He heard her crying
  She'd done it for love, he formed his lips to say "Bitch,"
  But breath and the light failed; he felt the animal
  Flurry of death waggle his arms and head,
  No pain from the loins down.
  
  Then all was perfect
  No-pain.
  
  Helen stood up from her deed
  And said "I have the other thing in my fingers.
  
  Oh Johnny Luna, go down and tell his mother
  That the ship has found land.
  
  " But when she looked,
  Luna was still tinkering the truck.
  
  She ran
  To the platform-end, and the wind threw her on the planks,
  She lay on her breasts and thighs, crying "Tell the old woman
  To come up here and see him like a king in Babylon
  With his slave lying at his feet.
  
  "
  Her face and the blood
  Moved him to flee into the wind and down
  The rock-path in the cliff-side.
  
  XXIII
  Reave's mother labored up the
  steep face, Luna behind her.
  
  The wind had sagged toward the southwest and somewhat declined
  in violence, so that a wide-winged hawk
  That had been hungry all day was able to hang in the birdless
  air of the rock-head when they came up,
  Probing with her eyes wild buckwheat bushes and sage and the
  polished leaves of the barren strawberry; she looked
  Nailed to the firmament, her twitching wings like the spread
  hands of a crucified man fighting the nails;
  But Helen imagined her a vulture and was screaming at her.
  
  When Reave's mother came,
  Helen made shift to sit up on the planks beside her slain man,
  and staring with enormous violet eyes
  From a stained shrunk face, began to make words in a voice that
  was not her own: "I was afraid you'd not come.
  
  I have to tell you.
  
  But now I've taken Reave's lifetime of pain
  upon me to spend in an hour or two,
  And my throat's burnt, but I have to tell you
  As clearly as I might be able, because you ought to understand
  that I am not vile to the very end,
  And have done well.
  
  His death was rapid.
  
  But for mine, after
  I'd done it, if I'd taken any easy way
  Out, you'd have scorned me; and the watchful world might 'a.
  
  thought I'd done it unworthily, what I did out of pure love
  And pity; or thought that I die to escape punishment.
  
  Don't come
  near me yet, for I've not finished.
  
  I read
  In the Sunday paper, how they dug out the grave of a king in
  Babylon and found his women about him
  With their skulls knocked in; I planned to honor
  Reave in that way: he was like a king in some ways, and if he
  had found any great thing to do
  He might have done greatly.
  
  "
  She fell, drawing up her knees,
  and the mother said: "What poison?
  
  " Helen made no answer,
  But being asked a third time: "No," she answered faintly, "a
  woman's poison, a white one.
  
  The little tablets
  I used for fear of having a baby, in our happy time.
  
  " She fixed
  her eyes on the vacant air
  Above the sea-edge: "Why there's that tiny tiny thing with the
  yellow mop
  Come up to see us.
  
  Keep her off, please.
  
  No, Hester.
  
  No.
  
  You may watch if you like but I alone
  Am allowed to lie at his feet, my love is proved.
  
  "
  The old woman answered, "There's nobody.
  
  " She crept on the
  platform for the wind threw her down, and crept past Helen
  To Reave and said, "How did you do it?
  
  Did he let you do it?
  
  "
  Helen, coughing with laughter in the poison fever:
  "Reave let me?
  
  Have you gone crazy?
  
  I knifed him while I
  kissed his mouth.
  
  " She cried with pain
  At the end of speaking, and the mother: "I knew he would never
  give in, why did I ask?
  
  You have done well,
  You always were treacherous, you did it easily.
  
  " She found the
  hunting-knife
  And took it up from the blood against Reave's shoulder,
  Then Helen cried, raising herself on her hands,
  "You must not! You have no right.
  
  I alone saved him,
  Alone to die with him.
  
  " "When you die I will lay it down.
  
  You are not to get well.
  
  " Helen gasped, laughing
  And retching, "Oh that’s all?
  
  Old fool.
  
  Those little white things, meant to fight the seed of our lovers,
  Are seed themselves, I'm pregnant and swell fast,
  Baby death, darling, darling.
  
  "
  She widened terrified
  Eyes and said staring: "I can't
  Be silent in pain like Reave: Oh, I did hope to.
  
  I never dreamed, Oh, ooh; Oh, ooh.
  
  " The old woman watched her
  Attentively across Reave's body, and let the knife
  Drop on the planks.
  
  Helen heard it, and after a long while
  She said, stretching her throat, "Be merciful to me.
  
  As I was merciful to Reave.
  
  I can't bear
  The next hour.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Unless it would seem wrong?
  
  Reave not be honored enough?
  
  " "I think your time
  Is near," she answered.
  
  "There is an end or I'd help you: it will be braver in us
  Not to keep begging death out of the cloud
  Before he is ready.
  
  " But she crept under the wind
  Around Reave's body and kissed Helen's hand, and remained
  with her
  Tenderly until she died.
  
  The platform is like a rough plank theatre-stage
  Built on the brow of the promontory: as if our blood had labored
  all around the earth from Asia
  To play its mystery before strict judges at last, the final ocean
  and sky, to prove our nature
  More shining than that of the other animals.
  
  It is rather ignoble
  in its quiet times, mean in its pleasures,
  Slavish in the mass; but at stricken moments it can shine terribly
  against the dark magnificence of things.
  
  Luna came up the platform and stood shaking,
  Leaned over against the wind; the old woman said:
  "We can do nothing.
  
  She had a wasteful gallant spirit.
  
  It is not poured out yet; go down for now.
  
  "
  Toward evening the
  seas thundered on the rock, and rain fell heavily
  Like a curtain, with one red coal of sundown glowing in its dark.
  
  The old woman stood up
  And fell, and stood up and called: "Now come, it is time.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  To bear .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  endure .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  are poor things, Johnny; to live
  And bear what we can't strike back at: but we come to them
  Unless we fall off before.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Has the car lights?
  
  Help me: you'll have to carry all the weight.
  
  I am the last
  And worst of four: and at last the unhappiest: but that's nothing.
  
  "
  357

• Time Of Disturbance Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The best is, in war or faction or ordinary vindictive
  life, not to take sides.
  
  Leave it for children, and the emotional rabble of the
  streets, to back their horse or support a brawler.
  
  But if you are forced into it: remember that good and
  evil are as common as air, and like air shared
  By the panting belligerents; the moral indignation that
  hoarsens orators is mostly a fool.
  
  Hold your nose and compromise; keep a cold mind.
  
  Fight,
  if needs must; hate no one.
  
  Do as God does,
  Or the tragic poets: they crush their man without hating
  him, their Lear or Hitler, and often save without
  love.
  
  As for these quarrels, they are like the moon, recurrent
  and fantastic.
  
  They have their beauty but night's
  is better.
  
  It is better to be silent than make a noise.
  
  It is better
  to strike dead than strike often.
  
  It is better not
  to strike.

• To A Young Artist Read Poem Log in to favourite

  It is good for strength not to be merciful
  To its own weakness, good for the deep urn to run
  over, good to explore
  The peaks and the deeps, who can endure it,
  Good to be hurt, who can be healed afterward: but
  you that have whetted consciousness
  Too bitter an edge, too keenly daring,
  So that the color of a leaf can make you tremble
  and your own thoughts like harriers
  Tear the live mind: were your bones mountains,
  Your blood rivers to endure it?
  
  and all that labor
  of discipline labors to death.
  
  Delight is exquisite, pain is more present;
  You have sold the armor, you have bought shining
  with burning, one should be stronger than
  strength
  To fight baresark in the stabbing field
  In the rage of the stars: I tell you unconsciousness
  is the treasure, the tower, the fortress;
  Referred to that one may live anything;
  The temple and the tower: poor dancer on the flints
  and shards in the temple porches,   turn home.

• To Helen About Her Hair Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Your hair is long and wonderful;
  It is dark, with golden
  Lights in the length of it.
  
  Long, lovely, liquid, glorious
  Is your hair, and lustrous,
  Scented with summertime.
  
  Beware when you are combing it,
  In the nights and mornings,
  Shaking its splendor out.
  
  I bid you comb it carefully,
  For my soul is caught there,
  Wound in the web of it.

• To His Father Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Christ was your lord and captain all your life,
  He fails the world but you he did not fail,
  He led you through all forms of grief and strife
  Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail
  Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake
  That coils in one's own brain against your calm,
  That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake
  With coronal age and death like quieting balm.
  
  I Father having followed other guides
  And oftener to my hurt no leader at all,
  Through years nailed up like dripping panther hides
  For trophies on a savage temple wall
  Hardly anticipate that reverend stage
  Of life, the snow-wreathed honor of extreme age.

• To The House Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I am heaping the bones of the old mother
  To build us a hold against the host of the air;
  Granite the blood-heat of her youth
  Held molten in hot darkness against the heart
  Hardened to temper under the feet
  Of the ocean cavalry that are maned with snow
  And march from the remotest west.
  
  This is the primitive rock, here in the wet
  Quarry under the shadow of waves
  Whose hollows mouthed the dawn; little house each stone
  Baptized from that abysmal font
  The sea and the secret earth gave bonds to affirm you.

• To The Rock That Will Be A Cornerstone Of The House Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Old garden of grayish and ochre lichen,
  How long a rime since the brown people who have vanished from
  here
  Built fires beside you and nestled by you
  Out of the ranging sea-wind?
  
  A hundred years, two hundred,
  You have been dissevered from humanity
  And only known the stubble squirrels and the headland rabbits,
  Or the long-fetlocked plowhorses
  Breaking the hilltop in December, sea-gulls following,
  Screaming in the black furrow; no one
  Touched you with love, the gray hawk and the red hawk touched
  you
  Where now my hand lies.
  
  So I have brought you
  Wine and white milk and honey for the hundred years of famine
  And the hundred cold ages of sea-wind.
  
  I did not dream the taste of wine could bind with granite,
  Nor honey and milk please you; but sweetly
  They mingle down the storm-worn cracks among the mosses,
  Interpenetrating the silent
  Wing-prints of ancient weathers long at peace, and the older
  Scars of primal fire, and the stone
  Endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry
  A corner of the house, this also destined.
  
  Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you
  The wings of the future, for I have them.
  
  How dear you will be to me when I too grow old, old comrade.

• To The Stone-Cutters Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated
  Challengers of oblivion
  Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
  The square-limbed Roman letters
  Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.
  
  The poet as well
  Builds his monument mockingly;
  For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
  Die blind and blacken to the heart:
  Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
  The honey of peace in old poems.

• Tor House Read Poem Log in to favourite

  If you should look for this place after a handful
  of lifetimes:
  Perhaps of my planted forest a few
  May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast
  cypress, haggard
  With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
  
  Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers
  had the art
  To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
  
  But if you should look in your idleness after ten
  thousand years:
  It is the granite knoll on the granite
  And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth
  of the Carmel
  River-valley, these four will remain
  In the change of names.
  
  You will know it by the wild
  sea-fragrance of wind
  Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
  You will know it by the valley inland that our sun
  and our moon were born from
  Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
  Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like
  a lamp-lighted bridge.
  
  Come in the morning you will see white gulls
  Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
  Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
  By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in
  the world.
  
  My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
  Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not
  dancing on wind
  With the mad wings and the day moon.

• Triad Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Science, that makes wheels turn, cities grow,
  Moribund people live on, playthings increase,
  But has fallen from hope to confusion at her own business
  Of understanding the nature of things; new Russia,
  That stood a moment at dreadful cost half free,
  Beholding the open, all the glades of the world
  On both sides of the trap, and resolutely
  Walked into the trap that has Europe and America;
  The poet, who wishes not to play games with words,
  His affair being to awake dangerous images
  And call the hawks; they all feed the future, they serve God,
  Who is very beautiful, but hardly a friend of humanity.

• Vulture Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
  Above the ocean.
  
  I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling
  high up in heaven,
  And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit
  narrowing,
  I understood then
  That I was under inspection.
  
  I lay death-still and heard the flight-
  feathers
  Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
  
  I could see the naked red head between the great wings
  Bear downward staring.
  
  I said, "My dear bird, we are wasting time
  here.
  
  These old bones will still work; they are not for you.
  
  " But how
  beautiful
  he looked, gliding down
  On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the
  sea-light
  over the precipice.
  
  I tell you solemnly
  That I was sorry to have disappointed him.
  
  To be eaten by that beak
  and
  become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes—
  What a sublime end of one's body, what and enskyment; what a life
  after death.

• We Are Those People Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I have abhorred the wars and despised the liars, laughed at the frightened
  And forecast victory; never one moment's doubt.
  
  But now not far, over the backs of some crawling years, the next
  Great war's column of dust and fire writhes
  Up the sides of the sky: it becomes clear that we too may suffer
  What others have, the brutal horror of defeat—
  Or if not in the next, then in the next—therefore watch Germany
  And read the future.
  
  We wish, of course, that our women
  Would die like biting rats in the cellars, our men like wolves on the mountain:
  It will not be so.
  
  Our men will curse, cringe, obey;
  Our women uncover themselves to the grinning victors for bits of chocolate.

• What Are Cities For? Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The earth has covered Sicilian Syracuse, there asphodel grows,
  As golden-rod will over New York.
  
  What tragic labors, passions, oppressions, cruelties and courage
  Reared the great city.
  
  Nothing remains
  But stones and a memory haunting the fields of returning asphodel.
  
  You have seen through the trick to the beauty;
  If we all saw through it, the trick would hardly entice us and
  the earth
  Be the poorer by many beautiful agonies.

• Where I? Read Poem Log in to favourite

  This woman cannot live more than one year.
  
  Her growing death is hidden in a hopeless place,
  Her death is like a child growing in her,
  And she knows it, you see it shine in her face.
  
  She looks at her own hands and thinks "In a year
  These will be burnt like rags in the crematory.
  
  I shall not feel it.
  
  Where I?
  
  Where I?
  
  Not anywhere.
  
  "
  It is strange, it gives to her face a kind of glory.
  
  Her mind used to be lazy and heavy her face,
  Now she talks all in haste, looks young and lean
  And eager, her eyes glitter with eagerness,
  As if she were newly born and had never seen
  The beauty of things, the terror, pain, joy, the song.
  
  Or is it better to live at ease, dully and long?

• Winged Rock Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The flesh of the house is heavy sea-orphaned stone, the imagination
  of the house
  Is in those little clay kits of swallows
  Hung in the eaves, bright wings flash and return, the heavy rock
  walls commercing
  With harbors of the far hills and the high
  Rills of water, the river-meadow and the sea-cloud.
  
  You have
  also, O sleepy stones,
  The red, the white and the marbled pigeons
  To beat the blue air over the pinewood and back again in a moment;
  and the bush-hidden
  Killdeer nest against the west wall-foot,
  That is fed from many strange ebbs; besides the woodful of
  finches, the shoring gulls,
  The sudden attentive passages of hawks.

• Wise Men In Their Bad Hours Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Wise men in their bad hours have envied
  The little people making merry like grasshoppers
  In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking
  Backward but never forward, and if they somehow
  Take hold upon the future they do it
  Half asleep, with the tools of generation
  Foolishly reduplicating
  Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too,
  Groan against labors, wars and partings,
  Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended
  The summer insects enviable;
  One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery.
  
  Strength and desire possess the future,
  The breed of the grasshopper shrills, "What does the future
  Matter, we shall be dead?
  
  " Ah, grasshoppers,
  Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
  Something more equal to the centuries
  Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
  
  The mountains are dead stone, the people
  Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
  The mountains are not softened nor troubled
  And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.

• Woodrow Wilson Read Poem Log in to favourite

  (FEBRUARY, 1924)
  It said "Come home, here is an end, a goal,
  Not the one raced for, is it not better indeed?
  
  Victory you know
  requires
  Force to sustain victory, the burden is never lightened, but final
  defeat
  Buys peace: you have praised peace, peace without victory.
  
  "
  He said "It seems I am traveling no new way,
  But leaving my great work unfinished how can I rest?
  
  I enjoyed
  a vision,
  Endured betrayal, you must not ask me to endure final defeat,
  Visionless men, blind hearts, blind mouths, live still.
  
  "
  It said "Yet perhaps your vision was less great
  Than some you scorned, it has not proved even so practicable;
  Lenin
  Enters this pass with less reluctance.
  
  As to betrayals: there are so
  many
  Betrayals, the Russians and the Germans know.
  
  "
  He said "I knew I have enemies, I had not thought
  To meet one at this brink: shall not the mocking voices die in
  the grave?
  
  "
  It said "They shall.
  
  Soon there is silence.
  
  " "I dreamed this end,"
  he said, "when the prow
  Of the long ship leaned against dawn, my people
  Applauded me, and the world watched me.
  
  Again
  I dreamed it at Versailles, the time I sent for the ship, and the
  obstinate foreheads
  That shared with me the settlement of the world flinched at my
  threat and yielded.
  
  That is all gone.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  Do I remember this darkness?
  
  "
  It said "No man forgets it but a moment.
  
  The darkness before the mother, the depth of the return.
  
  " "I
  thought" he answered,
  "That I was drawn out of this depth to establish the earth on
  peace.
  
  My labor
  Dies with me, why was I drawn out of this depth?
  
  "
  It said "Loyal to your highest, sensitive, brave,
  Sanguine, some few ways wise, you and all men are drawn out of
  this depth
  Only to be these things you are, as flowers for color, falcons for
  swiftness,
  Mountains for mass and quiet.
  
  Each for its quality
  Is drawn out of this depth.
  
  Your tragic quality
  Required the huge delusion of some major purpose to produce it.
  
  What, that the God of the stars needed your help?
  
  " He said
  "This is my last
  Worst pain, the bitter enlightenment that buys peace.
  
  "

• The Place for No Story Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The coast hills at Sovranes Creek;
  No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
  Over rock shaped like flame;
  The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast
  Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
  A herd of cows and the bull
  Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
  And the gray air haunted with hawks:
  This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.
  
  No imaginable
  Human presence here could do anything
  But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.