To Andrew
Paris,
November
Their faces are bony and sharp but very red, althoughtheir ancestors nearly two hundred years have dweltby the miasmal banks of tidewaters where malarial fevermakes men gaunt and dosing with quinine shakes themas with a palsy.
Traveller to America (1799).
What years of the other times, what
Broken, divided up and claimed?
A
Here and there to the taste, in
Ceaseless, but now a little stale, to keep
Fearless, not worried as the hare
Without memory . . . Provence,
The Renascence, the age of Pericles, eachA broad, rich-carpeted stair to
With manhood now the cost-they're easy to
For the ways taken are all notorious,
Lettered, sculptured, and rhymed;
Those others, incuriously complete, lost,
Not by poetry and statues timed,
Shattered by sunlight and the impartial sleet.
What years . . .
What centuries . . . Now
The bent eaves and the windows cracked,
The thin grass picked by the wind,
Heaved by the mole; the hollow pine
Screams in the latest storm-these,
These emblems of twilight have we seen at length,
And the man red-faced and tall seen,
In the day of his
Not as a pine, but the stiff
Against the west pillar,
Hearing the ox-cart in the street-His shadow gliding, a long
Gliding at his feet.
Wanderers to the east, wanderers west:
I followed the cold northern track,
The sleet sprinkled the sea;
The dim foam
The night, the ship
The depths of night-How absolute the sea!
With dawn came the gull to the crest,
Stared at the spray, fell
Over the picked bones, the white
Of the leaning man drowned deep;
The red-faced man, ceased wandering,
Never came to the
Nor covertly spat in the
Sunk in his
Shuffling the cards;
The man with the red face, the stiff back,
I cannot see in the
Down Saint-Michel by the quays,
At the corner the wind
Destiny, the four ways.
II cannot see
The incorruptibles,
Yours was a secret fate,
The stiff-backed liars, the dupes:
The universal
Of heaven rots,
Your anger is out of date-What did you say mornings?
Evenings, what?
The bent
On the cracked house,
That ghost of a hound. . . .
The man red-faced and
Will cast no
From the province of the drowned.
