The sea is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs
an early sunset and a last morning star over the
oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land . . . five
white dice rolled from a tube.
Not so long ago ... the sea was large . . .
And to-day the sea has lost nothing ... it keeps all.
I am a loon about the sea.
I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I
forget so many sea songs and sea cries.
I am a loon about the sea.
So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper
shack trembling in a sand storm.
The sea knows more about them than they know themselves.
They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go.
The pawn-shop man knows hunger.
And how far hunger has eaten the heart
Of one who comes with an old keepsake.
Here are wedding rings and baby bracelets,
Scarf pins and shoe buckles, jeweled garters,
Old-fashioned knives with inlaid handles.
Watches of old gold and silver,
Old coins worn with finger-marks.
They tell stories.
For a woman's face remembered as a spot of quick light
on the flat land of dark night,
For this memory of one mouth and a forehead they go
on in the gray rain and the mud, they go on among
the boots and guns.
The horizon ahead is a thousand fang flashes, it is a row
of teeth that bite on the flanks of night, the horizon
sings of a new kill and a big kill.
The horizon behind is a wall of dark etched with a
memory, fixed with a woman's face — they fight on
and on, boots in the mud and heads in the gray
rain — for the women they hate and the women they
love — for the women they left behind, they fight on.
Passers-by,
Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me
Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe soles traveled
And your voices rose and blent
To form the city's afternoon roar
Hindering an old silence.
Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,
Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love,
Records of great wishes slept with,
Held long
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker.
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves.
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories.
And asks you
Guns on the battle lines have pounded now a year between
Brussels and Paris.
And, William Morris, when I read your old chapter on
the great arches and naves and little whimsical corners
of the Churches of Northern France — Brr-rr!
I'm glad you're a dead man, William Morris, I'm glad
you're down in the damp and mouldy, only a memory
instead of a living man — I'm glad you're gone.
You never lied to us, William Morris, you loved the
shape of those stones piled and carved for you to
dream over and wonder because workmen got joy
of life into them.
Workmen in aprons singing while they hammered, and
praying, and putting their songs and prayers into
the walls and roofs, the bastions and cornerstones
After the last red sunset glimmer.
Black on the line of a low hill rise,
Formed into moving shadows, I saw
A plowboy and two horses lined against the gray,
Plowing in the dusk the last furrow.
The turf had a gleam of brown,
And smell of soil was in the air.
And, cool and moist, a haze of April.
I shall remember you long,
Plowboy and horses against the sky in shadow.
I shall remember you and the picture
You made for me.
Turning the turf in the dusk
And haze of an April gloaming.
You will come one day in a waver of love,
Tender as dew, impetuous as rain.
The tan of the sun will be on your skin,
The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,
You will pose with a hill-flower grace.
You will come, with your slim, expressive arms,
A poise of the head no sculptor has caught
And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck,
Your face in a pass-and-repass of moods
As many as skies in delicate change
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.
Yet,
You may not come, O girl of a dream.
We may but pass as the world goes by
And take from a look of eyes into eyes,
A film of hope and a memoried day.
Shaken,
The blossoms of lilac,
And shattered,
The atoms of purple.
Green dip the leaves.
Darker the bark.
Longer the shadows.
Sheer lines of poplar
Shimmer with masses of silver
And down in a garden old with years
And broken walls of ruin and story,
Roses rise with red rain-memories.
May!
In the open world
The sun comes and finds your face,
Remembering all.
I WAS shipmate with Sorrow in a day gone by;
We shared wheel and look-out, old Sorrow and I;
Good times and bad times, foul weather and fair,
The old grey face of him was always there.
There was never chanty raised there, never song I heard.
But his voice would be in it like a crying bird ;
I was dull in the dog watches, when the laugh went free.
Because of old Sorrow sitting down by me.
I thought I could lose him in the stir and change
Of bright, wicked cities, all sunlit and strange ;
There came a hand at my elbow and a voice in my ear —
It was old patient Sorrow saying: "Lad, I'm here!"
And by the bustling harbour, up the busy street.
Many a time I see him, many a time I meet
All in a green thicket I heard a bird sing,
And blithe though his song was it made the tears spring,
To hear the bird sing as he swung on his spray,
All in a green thicket at break of the day.
All in a green thicket his song he did pour
That told of the Springs that shall come nevermore,
That sang of sweet blossoms, now faded and dry.
All in a green thicket in Aprils gone by.
All in a green thicket that morning in Spring,
I smelt the sharp scent of each young growing thing,
I smelt the sweet herbage all drowned with the dew.
And the time that's gone from me was with me anew.
All in a green thicket at break of the day
It was like the dear voice of a friend far away,
Letters from Home, you said.
Unopened they lay on the shack-sill
As you stared with me at the prairie
And the foothills bathed with light.
Letters from Home, you whispered,
And the homeland casements shone
Through the homeland dusk again,
And the sound of the birds came back,
And the soft green sorrowing hills,
And the sigh of remembered names,
The wine of remembered youth,--
Oh, these came back,
Back with those idle words
Of "Letters from Home"!
Over such desolate leagues,
Over such sundering seas,