To Jessie


                                                NOTE

. . . Parts of this poem have been printed in "The North American
Review, Others, Poetry, Youth, Coterie, The Yale Review". . . .  I am
indebted to Lafcadio Hearn for the episode called "The Screen Maiden"
in Part II.

     I.

     The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.
     The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east:
     And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.
     A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
     Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.

     And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
     The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
     And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
     The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
     The gorgeous night has begun again.

     'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
     I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
     I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .'
     The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
     Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
     Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.

     We hear him and take him among us, like a wind of music,
     Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard;
     We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
     We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
     With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
     We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
     Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .

     Good-night!  Good-night!  Good-night!  We go our ways,
     The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
     The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
     We walk, we run, we ride.  We turn our faces
     To what the eternal evening brings.

     Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
     We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
     We have built a city of towers.

     Our hands are light, they are