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