Dear Morris--here is your letter--Can my answer reach you now?
Fate has left me your debtor,
You will remember how;
For I went away to Nantucket,
And you to the Isle of Orleans,
And when I was dawdling and
Over the ways and
Of answering, the power was denied me,
Fate frowned and took her stand;
I have your unanswered
Here in my hand.
This--in your famous scribble,
It was ever a cryptic fist,
Cuneiform or
Meanings held in a mist.
Dear Morris, (now I'm
And poring over your script)I gather from the writing,
The coin that you had flipt,
Turned tails; and so you compel
To meet you at Touchwood Hills:
Or, mayhap, you are trying to tell
The sum of a painter's ills:
Is that Phimister
Or something about a doctor?
Well, nobody knows, but Eddie,
Whatever it is I'm ready.
For our friendship was always
In its greetings and adieux,
Nothing flat or importunate,
Nothing of the
That comes of the constant
Of one mind on another.
So memory has nothing to smother,
But only a few things
On the wing, as it were, and enraptured.
Yes,
Morris,
I am inditing--Answering at last it seems,
How can you read the
In the vacancy of dreams?
I would have you look over my
Ere the long, dark year is colder,
And mark that as memory grows older,
The brighter it pulses and gleams.
And if I should try to
The tissues of fugitive
That fled down the wind of living,
Will they read it some day in the future,
And be conscious of an
In our old lives, and the
Of theirs, with the newest
In the last fad of the fashions? * * * * *How often have we risen without
When the day star was hidden in mist,
When the dragon-fly was heavy with dew and sleep,
And viewed the miracle pre-eminent, matchless,
The prelusive light that quickens the morning.
O crystal dawn, how shall we distill your virginal
When you steal upon a land that man has not sullied with his intrusion,
When the aboriginal shy dwellers in the broad
Are asleep in their innumerable dens and night
Amid the dry ferns, in the tender
Pressed into shape by the breasts of the Mother birds?
How shall we simulate the thrill of
When lake after lake lingering in the
Turn their faces towards you,
And are caressed with the salutation of colour?
How shall we transmit in tendril-like images,
The tenuous tremor in the tissues of ether,
Before the round of colour buds like the dome of a shrine,
The preconscious moment when love has fluttered in the bosom,
Before it begins to ache?
How often have we seen the
Melt into the liquidity of twilight,
With passages of Titian splendour,
Pellucid preludes, exquisitely tender,
Where vanish and revive, thro' veils of the ashes of roses,
The crystal forms the breathless sky discloses.
The new moon a slender thing,
In a snood of virgin light,
She seemed all shy on
Into the vast night.
Her own land and folk were afar,
She must have gone astray,
But the gods had given a silver star,
To be with her on the way. * * * * *I can feel the wind on the
And see the bunch-grass wave,
And the sunlights ripple and
The hill with Crowfoot's grave,
Where he "pitched off" for the last
In sight of the Blackfoot Crossing,
Where in the sun for a
You marked the site of his
With a circle of stones.
Old
Gave you credit for that day.
And well I recall the
Of that evening at Qu'Appelle,
In the wigwam with old Sakimay,
The keen, acrid smell,
As the kinnikinick was burning;
The planets outside were turning,
And the little splints of
Flared with a thin, gold flame.
He showed us his painted
Where in primitive
He had drawn his feats and his forays,
And told us the
Of the man without a name,
The hated Blackfoot,
How he lured the warriors,
The young men, to the
And they never returned.
Only their
Goaded by the
Mounted on stallions:
In the night
He drove the
Reeking into the camp;
The women gasped and whispered,
The children cowered and crept,
And the old men
Where they slept.
When Sakimay looked
He saw the Blackfoot,
And the ghosts of the warriors,
And the black
Covered by the night
As by a mantle. * * * * *I remember well a day,
When the sunlight had free play,
When you worked in happy stress,
While grave
Sat for his portrait there,
In his beaded coat and his
Head, with his mottled
Of hawk's feathers,
A Man!
Ah Morris, those were the
When you sang your inconsequent
Sprung from a careless
He met her on the mountain,
He gave her a horn to blow,
And the very last words he said to
Were, 'Go 'long,
Eliza, go.'_"Foolish,--but life was all,
And under the skilful
Contours came at your call--Art grows and time lingers;--But now the song has a
Into something wistful and strange.
And one asks with a touch of
What became of the
And where did Eliza go?
He met her on the mountain,
He gave her a horn to blow,
The horn was a silver
With a mouthpiece of pure pearl,
And the mountain was all one glow,
With gulfs of blue and summits of rosy snow.
The cadence she blew on the silver
Was the meaning of life in one phrase caught,
And as soon as the magic notes were born,
She repeated them once in an afterthought.
They heard in the crystal passes,
The cadence, calling, calling,
And faint in the deep crevasses,
The echoes falling, falling.
They stood apart and wondered;
Her lips with a wound were aquiver,
His heart with a sword was sundered,
For life was changed
When he gave her the horn to blow:
But a shadow arose from the valley,
Desolate, slow and tender,
It hid the herdsmen's chalet,
Where it hung in the emerald meadow,(Was death driving the shadow?)It quenched the tranquil
Of the colour of life on the glow-peaks,
Till at the end of the even,
The last shell-tint on the
Had passed away from the heaven.
And yet, when it passed, victorious,
The stars came out on the mountains,
And the torrents gusty and glorious,
Clamoured in a thousand fountains,
And even far down in the valley,
A light re-discovered the chalet.
The scene that was veiled had a meaning,
So deep that none might know;
Was it here in the morn on the mountain,
That he gave her the horn to blow? * * * * *Tears are the crushed essence of this world,
The wine of life, and he who treads the
Is lofty with imperious
Of the burst grapes, the red tears and the murk.
But nay! that is a thought of the old poets,
Who sullied life with the passional
Of their world-weary hearts.
We of the sunrise,
Joined in the breast of God, feel deep the
That urges all things onward, not to an end,
But in an endless flow, mounting and mounting,
Claiming not overmuch for human life,
Sharing with our brothers of nerve and
The urgence of the one creative breath,--All in the dim twilight--say of morning,
Where the florescence of the light and
Haloes and hallows with a crown
The brows of life with love; herein the clue,
The love of life--yea, and the peerless
Of things not seen, that leads the least of
To cherish the green sprout, the hardening seed;
Here leans all nature with vast Mother-love,
Above the cradled future with a smile.
Why are there tears for failure, or sighs for weakness,
While life's rhythm beats on?
Where is the
To measure the distance we have circled and clomb?
Catch up the sands of the sea and count and
The failures hidden in our sum of conquest.
Persistence is the master of this life;
The master of these little lives of ours;
To the end--effort--even beyond the end. * * * * *Here,
Morris, on the plains that we have loved,
Think of the death of Akoose, fleet of foot,
Who, in his prime, a herd of
From sunrise, without rest, a hundred
Drove through rank prairie, loping like a wolf,
Tired them and slew them, ere the sun went down.
Akoose, in his old age, blind from the
Of tepees and the sharp snow light,
With his great grandchildren, withered and spent,
Crept in the warm sun along a
Stretched for his guidance.
Once when sharp
Made membranes of thin ice upon the sloughs,
He caught a pony on a quick
Of prowess and, all his instincts cleared and quickened,
He mounted, sensed the north and bore
To the Last Mountain Lake where in his
He shot the sand-hill-cranes with his flint arrows.
And for these hours in all the varied
Of pagan fancy and free dreams of
And crude adventure, he ranged on entranced,
Until the sun blazed level with the prairie,
Then paused, faltered and slid from off his pony.
In a little bluff of poplars, hid in the bracken,
He lay down; the populace of
In the lithe poplars whispered together and trembled,
Fluttered before a sunset of gold smoke,
With interspaces, green as sea water,
And calm as the deep water of the sea.
There Akoose lay, silent amid the bracken,
Gathered at last with the Algonquin Chieftains.
Then the tenebrous sunset was blown out,
And all the smoky gold turned into cloud wrack.
Akoose slept forever amid the poplars,
Swathed by the wind from the far-off Red
Where dinosaurs sleep, clamped in their rocky tombs.
Who shall count the time that lies
The sleep of Akoose and the dinosaurs?
Innumerable time, that yet is like the
Of the long wind that creeps upon the
And dies away with the shadows at sundown. * * * * *What we may think, who brood upon the theme,
Is, when the old world, tired of spinning, has
Asleep, and all the forms, that carried the
Of life, are cold upon her marble heart--Like ashes on the altar--just as she stops,
That something will escape of soul or essence,--The sum of life, to kindle otherwhere:
Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden,
Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain,
Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart,
And looses a gold kernel to the mould,
So the old world, hanging long in the sun,
And deep enriched with effort and with love,
Shall, in the motions of maturity,
Wither and part, and the kernel of it
Escape, a lovely wraith of spirit, to
Where the appearance, throated like a bird,
Winged with fire and bodied all with passion,
Shall flame with presage, not of tears, but joy.
