In anger, in irritation, in argument, what happens to you and me?
Something fine weaving us round is torn open.
Something fine permeating us is drawn from the veins.
Presences waiting to understand us retreat to a farther ante-room of us.
Little cells are incommunicably sealed.
All this happened to me and some strange progress was halted until something in me could be repaired.
The whole race halted with me.
The light of the remotest star, do you imagine that it did not know?
Innumerable influences ceased to pour upon us all.
And it was because someone left the attic window open and it had rained on an old bureau.
II
MINUET
I went from Fifth avenue into the Plaza on a sunny Winter morning.
There on a little stage it was Spring. A shepherdess walked.
Beside a stream girls were tying garlands. A harp was touched.
The shepherdess and her lovers danced a minuet on the bright emerald of that shining field.
Down by Brooklyn Bridge——
Now this sharp contrast will shock you, but we must not interrupt the minuet——
I know a place down by Brooklyn Bridge where a woman
(Young, once pretty, still with tender eyes)
Carries water up five flights of stairs to do washing.
I watched the minuet and I thought about that woman.
Did God create two worlds?
Or has man made a world? And can man see that his world is good?
III
THE DINING ROOM
I laid the blue dishes on the table.
The dining room was still and sunny.
Zinnias were in a brown basket,
The grape-fruit plant was glossy in a window.
Skilful fingers had wrought the border of the curtain.
My grand-mother’s blue pitcher was on the sideboard.
There were chestnut leaves in the brown rug.
Barometer and thermometer recorded miracle on the rose wall.
Dark wood paneled and beamed us in together.
As I worked these exquisite patient familiar things let me within.
They let me look with their eyes, feel with their beating pulses of hurrying molecules.
I perceived how locomotion and consciousness and self-consciousness have advanced us.
By what means shall we go forward now?
Does anyone wonder at my slow patience as I wonder at the slow patience of these exquisite and familiar things?