Days and Dreams: Poems

by Madison Julius Cawein

6.

And here alone I sit and see it so.
A vale of willows swelling into knobs,
A bulwark eastward. Sloping low
Westward the scooping waters flow
Under a rocky culvert's arch that throbs
With clanging wheels of transient trains that go
Screaming to north and south.
Here all the weary waters, stagnant stayed,
Sleep at the culvert's mouth;
The current's hungry hiccup still afraid,
Haply, that I should never know
The secret 'neath the striate scum o' the stream
The devil and the dream,
I, dropping gravels so the echo sob
Mocking and thin as music of a shade
In shades that wring from rocks a hollow woe,
Complaining phantoms of faint whispers rob.

There, up the valley where the lank grass leaps
Blades each a crooked kris,
The currents strike or miss
Dream melodies: No wide-belled mallow sleeps
Monandrous flowers oval as a kiss;
No mandrake curling convolutions up
Loops heavy blossoms, each a conical cup
That swoons moon-nectar and a serpent's hiss;
No tiger-lily, where the crayfish play,
Mirrors a savage face, a copper hue
Streaked with a crimson dew;
No dragon-fly in endless error keeps
Sewing the pale-gold gown of day
With tangled stitches of a burning blue,—
Whose brilliant body but a needle is,
An azurn and incarnate ray:—
But here, where haunted with the shade,
The dull stream stales and dies,
Are beauties none or few,
Such sinister and new;
And one at widest noon-gaze shrinks afraid
Beneath the timid skies;
So, if you ask me why I answer this:—

You know not; only where the kildees wade
There in the foamy scum,
There where the wet rocks ail,—
Low rocks to which the water-reptiles come,
Basking pied bodies in the brindled shade,—
Dim as a bubble's prism on the grail
Below, an angled sparkle rayed,
While lights and shadows aid
From breeze-blown clouds that lounge at sunny loss,
Deep down, a sense of wavy features quail
The heart; with lips that writhe and fade
And clench; tough, rooty limbs that twist and cross,
And flabby hair of smoky moss.

A brimstone sunset. And at night
The twinkling flies in will-o'-the-wisp dance wheel
Through copse and open, all a gnomish green.
I hear the water, and the wave is white
There where the boulder plants a keel,
And each taunt ripple 's sheen.—
Where instant insects dot
The dark with spurts of sulphur—bright,
Beneath the hazy height,
No bitter-almond trees make wan the night,
Building bloom ridges of a ghostly lustre,
But white-tops tossing cluster over cluster:
Huge-seen within that twilight spot—
As if a hill-born giant, half asleep,
Had dropped his night-cap while he drove his sheep
Foldward through fallow browns
And foxy grays,—a something crowns
The knoll—is it the odorous peak
Of one June-savory timothy stack?

Now, one dead ash behind,
A weak moon shows a withered cheek
Of Quaker quiet, wasted o'er the vines'
Appentice ruins roofing pillared pines:
Beyond these, back and back,
An oak-wood stretches black—
And here the whining were-wolves of the wind
Snuff snarling: but their eyes are blind,
Although their fangs are fierce;
And though they never pierce
Beyond the bad, bedevilled woodland streak,
I hear them, yes, I hear
A padding o' footsteps near,
A prowling pant in ear
And can not fly!—yes!—no!—
What horror holds me?—That uncoiling slow,
Sure, mastering chimera there,
Hooping firm unseen feelers 'round my neck
A binding, bruising coil ...
The waters burn and boil;
The fire-flies the dappled darkness fleck
With impish dabs of blazing wizard's oil ...
Deep, deep into the black eye of the beck
I stare, magnetic fixed, and little reck
If all the writhing shadow slips,
Dripping around me, to the eyes and hips,
Where grinning murder leers with lupine lips.