THE CHARNEL BIRD
Forslin murmurs a melodious impropriety
Musing on birds and women dead æons ago....
Was he not, once, this fowl, a gay bird in society?
Can any one tell?... After an evening out, who can know?
Perhaps Cleopatra, lush in her inadequate wrappings,
Lifted him once to her tatbebs.... Perhaps Helen of Troy
Found him more live than her Paris ... a bird among dead ones....
Perhaps Semiramis ... once ... in a pink unnamable joy * * *
I tie my shoes politely, a salute to this bird in his pear-tree;
... What is a pear-tree, after all.... What is a bird?
What is a shoe, or a Forslin, or even a Senlin?
What is ... a what?... Is there any one who has heard?...
What is it crawls from the kiss-thickened, Freudian darkness,
Amorous, catlike ... Ah, can it be a cat?
I would so much rather it had been a scarlet harlot,
There is so much more genuine poetry in that....
(Note by the Collator: It was, in fact, Fluffums, the Angora cat belonging to the Jenkinses on the corner; and the disappointment was too much for Mr. Aiken, who fainted away, and had to be taken back to Boston before completing his poem, which he had intended to fill an entire book.)
Mary Carolyn Davies
(Impetuously, with a floppy hat.)