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From “Kaleidoscope”
OCTOBER in New England: | |
| They are the gargoyles supporting old buttresses, | |
| These virgins that roam wistfully among the ruins, | |
| Victims of an effete worship. | |
| Some of them love their father, | 5 |
| Some of them love their mother, | |
| Some of them love themselves, | |
| Some of them watch for a sail | |
| That will never skim their horizon. | |
| They form the granite supports in the arches | 10 |
| Of old cathedrals and mausoleums with shut doors. | |
| They hold the rafters up, whose lacework | |
| Is the fluttering place of bats. | |
| There is a spacious cobweb covering all their nights | |
| With a dewless gossamer. | 15 |
| A stillness that is the speech of ice | |
| Consumes their swiftly gliding days. | |
| They mother the owl and nurse the adder | |
| In their vacuous dreams. | |
| Lost hopes run rivulets of despair | 20 |
| Down their parchment cheeks. | |
| They are rushing eagles without a sky; | |
| Their pinions are drenched, their heads droop | |
| And they cannot soar for the beating of the rain. | |
| Soon, and they will join their sisters the leafless trees, | 25 |
| Who stand like stone until the lightning strikes | |
| Them to the mouldy earth, or a lusty axe | |
| Fells them to the ground for the evening fire. | |
| Delicious would the blow of the axe seem, | |
| With health and vigor and lust springing from the handle. | 30 |
| Leaves are they that droop when the first frost touches | |
| Their veins; they coil together and wither on the stem, | |
| Swaying and swirling to the earth. | |
| Their eyes are like lanterns in the depths | |
| Of old cellars that are riddled with the years. | 35 |
| Deserted farms are they, with the good grain gone, | |
| The flax spun. The fox eats the grapes, the deer | |
| Pass furtively by on the edge of the dusk | |
| For the sweet apples fallen from the once young boughs. | |
| They search the cellar, seeking the hummingbird, | 40 |
| And find the cutworm on the beam. | |
| Gargoyles of stone—soon the wind will have lifted | |
| The furrows from your brows and cheeks, and hands. | |
| Soon—when the work of the wind and rain are done— | |
| You shall have the youth of the dust upon you— | 45 |
| Then you can run and dance and blow | |
| And toy with the wind as if you had borne | |
| Litters of laughing children. | |
| The dust is your sighing place: | |
| When you have finished with the mottoes | 50 |
| Of old gravestones—“here lies,” and what was good | |
| Graven in white words— | |
| You shall yourselves have one! | |
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| Bats breed in belfries, hummingbirds on young boughs! | |
| Spinsters, you are the gargoyles for high towers! | 55 |
| The burr of the chestnut hides the meaty nut! | |
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