Some Imagist Poets, 1916 Part 4

MEXICAN QUARTER

By an alley lined with tumble-down shacks And street-lamps askew, half-sputtering, Feebly glimmering on gutters choked with filth and dogs Scratching their mangy backs: Half-naked children are running about, Women puff cigarettes in black doorways, Crickets are crying.

Men slouch sullenly Into the shadows: Behind a hedge of cactus, The smell of a dead horse Mingles with the smell of tamales frying.

And a girl in a black lace shawl Sits in a rickety chair by the square of an unglazed window, And sees the explosion of the stars Softly poised on a velvet sky.

And she is humming to herself:-- "Stars, if I could reach you, (You are so very clear that it seems as if I could reach you) I would give you all to Madonna's image, On the grey-plastered altar behind the paper flowers, So that Juan would come back to me, And we could live again those lazy burning hours Forgetting the tap of my fan and my sharp words.

And I would only keep four of you, Those two blue-white ones overhead, To hang in my ears; And those two orange ones yonder, To fasten on my shoe-buckles."

A little further along the street A man sits stringing a brown guitar.

The smoke of his cigarette curls round his head, And he, too, is humming, but other words: "Think not that at your window I wait; New love is better, the old is turned to hate.

Fate! Fate! All things pa.s.s away; Life is forever, youth is for a day.

Love again if you may Before the stars are blown out of the sky And the crickets die; Babylon and Samarkand Are mud walls in a waste of sand."

RAIN IN THE DESERT

The huge red-b.u.t.tressed mesa over yonder Is merely a far-off temple where the sleepy sun is burning Its altar-fires of pinyon and of toyon for the day.

The old priests sleep, white-shrouded, Their pottery whistles lie beside them, the prayer-sticks closely feathered; On every mummied face there glows a smile.

The sun is rolling slowly Beneath the sluggish folds of the sky-serpents, Coiling, uncoiling, blue-black, sparked with fires.

The old dead priests Feel in the thin dried earth that is heaped about them, Above the smell of scorching oozing pinyon, The acrid smell of rain.

And now the showers Surround the mesa like a troop of silver dancers: Shaking their rattles, stamping, chanting, roaring, Whirling, extinguishing the last red wisp of light.

CLOUDS ACROSS THE CANYON

Shadows of clouds March across the canyon, Shadows of blue hands pa.s.sing Over a curtain of flame.

Clutching, staggering, upstriking, Darting in blue-black fury, To where pinnacles, green and orange, Await.

The winds are battling and striving to break them: Thin lightnings spit and flicker, The peaks seem a dance of scarlet demons Flitting amid the shadows.

Grey rain-curtains wave afar off, Wisps of vapour curl and vanish.

The sun throws soft shafts of golden light Over rose-b.u.t.tressed palisades.

Now the clouds are a lazy procession; Blue balloons bobbing solemnly Over black-dappled walls,

Where rise sharp-fretted, golden-roofed cathedrals Exultantly, and split the sky with light.

THE UNQUIET STREET

By day and night this street is not still: Omnibuses with red tail-lamps, Taxicabs with shiny eyes, Rumble, shunning its ugliness.

It is corrugated with wheel-ruts, It is dented and pockmarked with traffic, It has no time for sleep.

It heaves its old scarred countenance Skyward between the buildings And never says a word.

On rainy nights It dully gleams Like the cold tarnished scales of a snake: And over it hang arc-lamps, Blue-white death-lilies on black stems.

IN THE THEATRE

Darkness in the theatre: Darkness and a mult.i.tude a.s.sembled in the darkness.

These who every day perform The unique tragi-comedy Of birth and death; Now press upon each other, Directing the irresistible weight of their thoughts to the stage.

A great broad shaft of calcium light Cleaves, like a stroke of a sword, the darkness: And, at the end of it, A tiny spot which is the red nose of a comedian Marks the goal of the spot-light and the eyes which people the darkness.

SHIPS IN THE HARBOUR

Like a flock of great blue cranes Resting upon the water, The ships a.s.semble at morning, when the grey light wakes in the east.

Weary, no longer flying, Over the hissing spindrift, through the ravelled clutching sea; No longer over the tops of the waves spinning along north-eastward, In a great irregular wedge before the trade-wind far from land.

But drowsy, mournful, silent, Yet under their bulged projecting bows runs the silver foam of the sunlight, And rebelliously they shake out their plumage of sails, wet and heavy with the rain.

THE EMPTY HOUSE

Out from my window-sill I lean, And see a straight four-storied row Of houses.

Once, long ago, These had their glory: they were built In the fair palmy days before The Civil War when all the seas Saw the white sails of Yankee ships Scurrying home with spice and gold.

And many of these houses hung Proud wisps of crepe upon their doors On hearing that some son had died At Chancellorsville or Fredericksburg, Their offering to the Union side.

But man's forever drifting will Again took hold of him--again The fashionable quarter shifted: soon, Before some plastering had dried, Society packed up, went away.

Now, could you see these houses, You would not think they ever had a prime: A grim four-storied serried row Of rooms to let--at any time Tenants are moving in or out.

Families drifting down or struggling still To keep their heads up and not drown.

A tragic busy pettiness Has settled on them all, But one.

And in that one, when I came here, A family lived, but with its trunks packed up, And now that family's gone.

Its shutterless blindless windows let you look inside And see the sunlight chequering the bare floor With patterns from the window-frames All day.

Its backyard neatly swept, Contains no crammed ash-barrels and no lines For clothes to flap about on; It does not look by day as if it had Ever a living soul beneath its roof.

It seems to mark a gap in the grim line, No house at all, but an unfinished sh.e.l.l.