Blows silver trumpets over these,
As clear as apples on the trees.
I will go home and pack my pride,
Then with these beggar-tunes I’ll ride—
For all the hymns I try to sing
Are but Love’s beggars shivering
In thorny thickets where one sees
Stars grow for wild wet raspberries.
APRICOT JAM
BENEATH the dancing, glancing green
The tea is spread amid the sheen
Of pince-nez (glints of thought); thus seen,
In sharp reflections only, brain
Perceives the world all flat and plain
In rounded segments, joy and pain.
The parasols dance like the sun,
Cast wavering nets of shade that run
Across the chattering table’s fun,
The laughing faces, and across
Half-shadowed faces looking cross,
And black hair with a bird-bright gloss.
The flashing children stayed and checked,
Smooth india-rubber leaves reflect
Their parrot-green on circumspect
Glazed china, where the negroid tea
Reflects the world’s obscurity
In high lights such as pince-nez see.
And all the sheen of shadows feather
Muslin frocks like plumes; together,
In the hot and flashing weather,
Bird-high voices shrill and chatter
With the high and glinting clatter
Tea-cups make, and whispered patter—
(Listen, and you’ll get a slap!)
Worlds are small as any map,
And life will come our way—mayhap.
STOPPING PLACE
THE world grows furry, grunts with sleep ...
But I must on the surface keep.
The jolting of the train to me
Seems some primeval vertebræ
Attached by life-nerves to my brain—
Reactionary once again.
So that I see shapes crude and new
And ordered,—with some end in view,
No longer with the horny eyes
Of other people’s memories.
Through highly varnished yellow heat,
As through a lens that does not fit,
The faces jolt in cubes, and I
Perceive their odd solidity
And lack of meaning absolute:
For why should noses thus protrude,
And to what purpose can relate
Each hair so oddly separate?
Anchored against the puff of breeze,
As shallow as the crude blue seas,
The coloured blocks and cubes of faces
Seem Noah’s arks that shelter races
Of far absurdities to breed
Their queer kind after we are dead.
Blue wooden foliage creaks with heat
And there are woollen buns to eat—
Bright-varnished buns to touch and see
And, black as an Inferno, tea.
Then (Recketts’ blue) a puff of wind....
Heredity regains my mind
And I am sitting in the train
While thought becomes like flesh,—the brain
Not independent, but derived
From hairy matter that half lived—
Identities not round or whole.
A questing beast who thirsts for soul,
The furry vegetation there—
Purring with heat, sucks in the air;
And dust that’s gathered in the train,
Protecting flesh, seems almost brain—
(That horny substance altering sight);
How strange, intangible is light
Whence all is born, and yet by touch
We live,—the rest is not worth much....
Once more the world grows furred with sleep,—
But I must on the surface keep
While mammoths from the heat are born—
Great clumsy trains with tusk and horn
Whereon the world’s too sudden tossed
Through frondage of our mind, and lost.
PORTRAIT OF A BARMAID
METALLIC waves of people jar
Through crackling green toward the bar