On the lower rear porch of an apartment building, a servant-girl sings of pear-trees and scrapes yellow fruit. The speaker imagines her eyes as a sky that has never known sun, moon, or stars—a dead, kind face drained of light. Her song seems to remember a time when her “lavender-white eyes were alive” and she picked the fruit herself.
Above her sit two women with faces the color of dry brown earth, knitting grey rosettes and nibbling cakes; above them, children gravely kiss each other’s foreheads while a nurse waves a huge red fan. Each group is separate, quiet, and strangely cut off from real feeling. By the end, the dying afternoon matters to them only as longer blue-black shadows on brick walls. The mood is melancholic and still, full of faded vitality and brick-bound twilight.