Spoon River Anthology | Page 7

is no marriage in heaven
But there is love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
MY father who owned the wagon-shop
And grew rich shoeing horses

Sent me to the University of Montreal.
I learned nothing and
returned home,
Roaming the fields with Bert Kessler,
Hunting quail
and snipe.
At Thompson's Lake the trigger of my gun
Caught in the
side of the boat
And a great hole was shot through my heart.
Over
me a fond father erected this marble shaft,
On which stands the figure
of a woman
Carved by an Italian artist.
They say the ashes of my
namesake
Were scattered near the pyramid of Caius Cestius

Somewhere near Rome.
Flossie Cabanis
FROM Bindle's opera house in the village
To Broadway is a great
step.
But I tried to take it, my ambition fired
When sixteen years of
age,
Seeing "East Lynne," played here in the village
By Ralph
Barrett, the coming
Romantic actor, who enthralled my soul.
True, I
trailed back home, a broken failure,
When Ralph disappeared in New
York,
Leaving me alone in the city--
But life broke him also.
In
all this place of silence
There are no kindred spirits.
How I wish
Duse could stand amid the pathos
Of these quiet fields
And read
these words.
Julia Miller
WE quarreled that morning,
For he was sixty--five, and I was thirty,

And I was nervous and heavy with the child
Whose birth I dreaded.


I thought over the last letter written me
By that estranged young

soul
Whose betrayal of me I had concealed
By marrying the old
man.
Then I took morphine and sat down to read.
Across the
blackness that came over my eyes
I see the flickering light of these
words even now:
"And Jesus said unto him, Verily
I say unto thee,
To-day thou shalt
Be with me in paradise."
Johnnie Sayre
FATHER, thou canst never know
The anguish that smote my heart

For my disobedience, the moment I felt
The remorseless wheel of the
engine
Sink into the crying flesh of my leg.
As they carried me to
the home of widow Morris
I could see the school-house in the valley

To which I played truant to steal rides upon the trains.
I prayed to
live until I could ask your forgiveness--
And then your tears, your
broken words of comfort!
From the solace of that hour I have gained
infinite happiness. Thou wert wise to chisel for me:
"Taken from the
evil to come."
Charlie French
DID YOU ever find out
Which one of the O'Brien boys it was
Who
snapped the toy pistol against my hand?
There when the flags were
red and white
In the breeze and "Bucky" Estil
Was firing the
cannon brought to Spoon River
From Vicksburg by Captain Harris;

And the lemonade stands were running
And the band was playing,

To have it all spoiled
By a piece of a cap shot under the skin of my
hand,
And the boys all crowding about me saying:
"You'll die of
lock-jaw, Charlie, sure."
Oh, dear! oh, dear!
What chum of mine
could have done it?
Zenas Witt
I WAS sixteen, and I had the most terrible dreams,
And specks before
my eyes, and nervous weakness.
And I couldn't remember the books I
read,
Like Frank Drummer who memorized page after page.
And

my back was weak, and I worried and worried,
And I was
embarrassed and stammered my lessons,
And when I stood up to
recite I'd forget
Everything that I had studied.
Well, I saw Dr.
Weese's advertisement,
And there I read everything in print,
Just as
if he had known me;
And about the dreams which I couldn't help.

So I knew I was marked for an early grave.
And I worried until I had
a cough
And then the dreams stopped.
And then I slept the sleep
without dreams
Here on the hill by the river.
Theodore the Poet
As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid
Spoon
With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish's burrow,
Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
First his waving antennae,
like straws of hay,
And soon his body, colored like soap-stone,

Gemmed with eyes of jet.
And you wondered in a trance of thought

What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.
But later
your vision watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate
amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So
that you could see
How they lived, and for what,
And why they
kept crawling so busily
Along the sandy way where water fails
As
the summer wanes.
The Town Marshal
THE: Prohibitionists made me Town Marshal
When the saloons were
voted out,
Because when I was a drinking man,
Before I joined the
church, I killed a Swede
At the saw-mill near Maple Grove.
And
they wanted a terrible man,
Grim, righteous, strong, courageous,

And a hater of saloons and drinkers,
To keep law and order in the
village.
And they presented me with a loaded cane
With which I
struck Jack McGuire

Before he drew the gun with which he killed

The Prohibitionists spent their money in vain
To hang him, for in a
dream
I appeared to one of the twelve jurymen
And told him the

whole secret story.
Fourteen years were enough for killing me.
Jack McGuire
THEY would have lynched me
Had I not been secretly hurried