Isidor Schneider. The Mist. Harriet Monroe, ed. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912-22

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22.

The Mist

By Isidor Schneider


IS death a mist
In which life becomes invisible?

Yesterday
The world ended in mist.
It lay shrunken by immobility	5
Into a gray coffin.

The steeple rose,
Prodded and pricked the mist
Like a question
Investigating doubt.	10
Its dim spire
Found the horizon new arranged
In stories.
The world became strange,
Ungrateful	15
Of the jagged lights
That seamed its veils.

To me, walking,
The long road unravelled
A guiding string;	20
And my eyes
Carried before and behind
Its constant small visibility.

I faced the mist-made microcosm—
Where pebbles are boulders,	25
Puddles lakes,
Sidewalk-cracks long chasms,
The curb a precipice;
Where towers flew,
Roofs floated like rafts;	30
And smoke wreaths
Were like dark veins
Under a skin.

Is death a mist
In which life becomes invisible?	35