SLIP SHOE LOVEY
You’re the cook’s understudy
A gentle idiot body.
You are slender like a broom
Weaving up and down the room,
With your dirt hair in a twist
And your left eye in a mist.
Never thinkin’, never hopin’
With your wet mouth open.
So bewildered and so busy
As you scrape the dirty kettles,
O Slip Shoe Lizzie
As you rattle with the pans.
There’s a clatter of old metals,
O Slip Shoe Lovey,
As you clean the milk cans.
You’re a greasy little dovey,
A laughing scullery daughter,
As you slop the dish water,
So abstracted and so dizzy,
O Slip Shoe Lizzie!
So mussy, little hussie,
With the china that you break,
And the kitchen in a smear
When the bread is yet to bake,
And the market things are here—
O Slip Shoe Lovey!
You are hurrying and scurrying
From the sink to the oven,
So forgetful and so sloven.
You are bustling and hustling
From the pantry to the door,
With your shoe strings on the floor,
And your apron strings a-draggin’,
And your spattered skirt a-saggin’.
You’re an angel idiot lovey,
One forgives you all this clatter
Washing dishes, beating batter.
But there is another matter
As you dream above the sink:
You’re in love pitter-patter,
With the butcher-boy I think.
And he’ll get you, he has got you
If he hasn’t got you yet.
For he means to make you his,
O Slip Shoe Liz.
And your open mouth is wet
To a little boyish chatter.
You’re an easy thing to flatter
With your hank of hair a-twist,
And your left eye in a mist—
O Slip Shoe Lovey!
So hurried and so flurried
And just a little worried
You lean about the room,
Like a mop, like a broom.
O Slip Shoe Lovey!
O Slip Shoe Lovey!
THE ARCHANGELS
Flopped on the floor
With such a silken richness of dark hair,
Descending breezily like blown water from her brow,
And from the arched crown of her Raphael head,
Between the years of twenty-five and thirty,
Her face glows and is white,
Like the thin spirit of a candle light.
And over her forehead passes
Swift waves of splendor, which must be her thought,
Looking, it seems, as if a snowy curtain
Were rhythmically blown at dawn in a white room!
In each of her eyes there is a blue-bright spark!
One time I saw two stars
Held in an inch of water when the evening
Was pale from dying day.
And under this thin water lay dead leaves
The drift of late October—
Gray leaves beneath clear water by an edge
Where spring’s first flower, the azure pickerel weed,
Bent over contemplated those two stars:
These were the sparks in her unruffled eyes.
Flopped on the floor
With little hands clasped round her girlish knees
Such musical thought sings through her cherub lips—
Raptures for Beauty,
Raptures for Truth,
Raptures for Freedom and a world that is free.
While around her flames the fire of a durable hope.
Till at last I sit in wonder
At the miracle of such spirit,
And the miracle of the youths about her,
Listening with bright eyes, in the fellowship of delight,
Who prompt, suggest, applaud, are passionate
For the right word, the soaring thought to beat
At heaven’s gate in a last burst of song.
And here am I a part of this psychic circle,
Bound with soft loops of gold in a charméd band
Of a brood of youthful archangels fiery and strong....