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In the frosty evening

Toll the old bell for me
Once, in the sleepy temple.

Perhaps my soul will hear.

Afterglow:

Before the stars peep

I shall creep out into darkness.

DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI

EMBARKATION

Dull masses of dense green,

The forests range their sombre platforms.
Between them silently, like a spirit,
The river finds its own mysterious path.

Loosely the river sways out, backward, forward,

Always fretting the outer side;

Shunning the invisible focus of each crescent,
Seeking to spread into shining loops over fields:

Like an enormous serpent, dilating, uncoiling,

Displaying a broad scaly back of earth-smeared gold;

Swaying out sinuously between the dull motionless forests,

As molten metal might glide down the lip of a vase of dark bronze.

HEAT

As if the sun had trodden down the sky,

Until no more it holds air for us, but only humid vapor,

The heat, pressing upon earth with irresistible languor,

Turns all the solid forest into half-liquid smudge.

The heavy clouds, like cargo-boats, strain slowly up 'gainst its current;

And the flickering of the heat haze is like the churning of ten thousand paddles

Against the heavy horizon, pale blue and utterly windless,
Whereon the sun hangs motionless, a brassy disk of flame.

FULL MOON

Flinging its arc of silver bubbles, quickly shifts the moon
From side to side of us as we go down its path;

I sit on the deck at midnight, and watch it slipping and sliding,
Under my tilted chair, like a thin film of spilt water.

It is weaving a river of light to take the place of this river—
A river where we shall drift all night, then come to rest in its

shallows.

And then I shall wake from my drowsiness and look down from some dim tree-top

Over white lakes of cotton, like moon-fields on every side.

THE MOON'S ORCHESTRA

When the moon lights up

Its dull red camp-fire through the trees;

And floats out, like a white balloon,

Into the blue cup of the night, borne by a casual breeze;

The moon-orchestra then begins to stir:

Jiggle of fiddles commence their crazy dance in the darkness;
Crickets churr

Against the stark reiteration of the rusty flutes which frogs

Puff at from rotted logs

In the swamp.

And the moon begins her dance of frozen pomp

Over the lightly quivering floor of the flat and mournful river.

Her white feet slightly twist and swirl

She is a mad girl

In an old unlit ball-room,

Whose walls, half-guessed-at through the gloom,

Are hung with the rusty crape of stark black cypresses,

Which show, through gaps and tatters, red stains half hidden

away.

THE STEVEDORES

Frieze of warm bronze that glides with cat-like movements
Over the gang-plank poised and yet awaiting-
The sinewy thudding rhythms of forty shuffling feet
Falling like muffled drum-beats on the stillness:

Oh, roll the cotton down

Roll, roll, the cotton down!

From the further side of Jordan,

Oh, roll the cotton down!

And the river waits,

The river listens,

Chuckling with little banjo-notes that break with a plop on the stillness.

And by the low dark shed that holds the heavy freights,

Two lonely cypress trees stand up and point with stiffened fingers Far southward where a single chimney stands aloof in the sky.

NIGHT LANDING

After the whistle's roar has bellowed and shuddered,
Shaking the sleeping town and the somnolent river,
The deep-toned floating of the pilot's bell
Suddenly warns the engines.

They pause like heart-beats that abruptly stop:
The shore glides to us, in a wide low curve.

And then supreme revelation of the river

The tackle is loosed, the long gang-plank swings outwards;

And poised at the end of it, half naked beneath the search-light,

A blue-black negro with gleaming teeth waits for his chance to leap.

THE SILENCE

There is a silence which I carry about with me always

A silence perpetual, for it is self-created;

A silence of heat, of water, of unchecked fruitfulness,

Through which each year the heavy harvests bloom, and burst, and fall.

Deep, matted green silence of my South,

Often, within the push and the scorn of great cities,

I have seen that mile-wide waste of water swaying out to you,
And on its current glimmering I am going to the sea.

There is a silence I have achieved-I have walked beyond its threshold.

I know it is without horizons, boundless, fathomless, perfect.

And some day maybe, far away,

I shall curl up in it at last and sleep an endless sleep.

F. S. Flint

LONDON

London, my beautiful,
It is not the sunset
Nor the pale green sky
Shimmering through the curtain
Of the silver birch,
Nor the quietness;
It is not the hopping
Of the little birds
Upon the lawn,

Nor the darkness

Stealing over all things

That moves me.

But as the moon creeps slowly

Over the tree-tops

Among the stars,

I think of her

And the glow her passing

Sheds on men.

London, my beautiful,

I will climb

Into the branches

[blocks in formation]

Into the dark of the arch the swan floats

And the black depth of my sorrow

Bears a white rose of flame.

IN THE GARDEN

The grass is beneath my head;

And I gaze

At the thronging stars

In the aisles of night.

They fall... they fall. . . .

I am overwhelmed,

And afraid.

Each little leaf of the aspen

Is caressed by the wind,
And each is crying.

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