A mood whose heart was a flagon of ashes,
Met another mood whose lips were stained
With the odors of sleeping wine-songs.
The second mood kissed the breast of the first
And filled the ashen flagon with his pale purple breath.
Then the two moods died, and he who bore them,
Being an old man, sat down to make others.
A woman with a burning flame
Deep covered through the years
With ashes. Ah! she hid it deep,
And smothered it with tears.
Sometimes a baleful light would rise
From out the dusky bed,
And then the woman hushed it quick
To slumber on, as dead.
At last the weary war was done
The tapers were alight,
And with a sigh of victory
She breathed a soft — good-night!
Pour no blood on ashes, brother,
That is not the way;
Better say nothing,
Blood is no life-giver;
It makes death look so gay.
Dead life, or dead love
Need no blood at all.
No trumpet's call can
Bring back what you lived, and strove:
The ashes know no thrall!
Why cry for a colored glass
That for jewel you took;
The magic--the dream--
All returning to dust and grass,
Not a day love your soul forsook.
At last, you have known it,
There is a woman on Michigan Boulevard keeps a
parrot and goldfish and two white mice.
She used to keep a houseful of girls in kimonos and
three pushbuttons on the front door.
Now she is alone with a parrot and goldfish and two
white mice . . . but these are some of her thoughts :
The love of a soldier on furlough or a sailor on shore
leave burns with a bonfire red and saffron.
The love of an emigrant workman whose wife is a
thousand miles away burns with a blue smoke.
The love of a young man whose sweetheart married
an older man for money burns with a sputtering uncertain
flame.
And there is a love . . . one in a thousand . . .,
burns clean and is gone leaving a white ash. . . .
Crimson is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
(A great man I know is dead and while he lies in his
coffin a gone flame I sit here in cumbering shadows
and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)
Out of the fire
Came a man sunken
To less than cinders,
A tea-cup of ashes or so.
And I,
The gold in the house,
Writhed into a stiff pool.