The Man against the Sky | Page 5

last great wars?
"What unrecorded overthrow?Of all the world has ever known,?Or ever been, has made itself?So plain to you, and you alone?
"Your Dollar, Dove and Eagle make?A Trinity that even you?Rate higher than you rate yourselves;?It pays, it flatters, and it's new.
"And though your very flesh and blood?Be what your Eagle eats and drinks,?You'll praise him for the best of birds,?Not knowing what the Eagle thinks.
"The power is yours, but not the sight;?You see not upon what you tread;?You have the ages for your guide,?But not the wisdom to be led.
"Think you to tread forever down?The merciless old verities??And are you never to have eyes?To see the world for what it is?
"Are you to pay for what you have?With all you are?" -- No other word?We caught, but with a laughing crowd?Moved on. None heeded, and few heard.
John Gorham
"Tell me what you're doing over here, John Gorham,?Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you're not;?Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlight Are a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot." --
"I'm over here to tell you what the moon already?May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago;?I'm over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland,?And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so." --
"Tell me what you're saying to me now, John Gorham,?Or you'll never see as much of me as ribbons any more;?I'll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers,?And you'll not follow far for one where flocks have been before." --
"I'm sorry now you never saw the flocks, Jane Wayland,?But you're the one to make of them as many as you need.?And then about the vanishing. It's I who mean to vanish;?And when I'm here no longer you'll be done with me indeed." --
"That's a way to tell me what I am, John Gorham!?How am I to know myself until I make you smile??Try to look as if the moon were making faces at you,?And a little more as if you meant to stay a little while." --
"You are what it is that over rose-blown gardens?Makes a pretty flutter for a season in the sun;?You are what it is that with a mouse, Jane Wayland,?Catches him and lets him go and eats him up for fun." --
"Sure I never took you for a mouse, John Gorham;?All you say is easy, but so far from being true?That I wish you wouldn't ever be again the one to think so; For it isn't cats and butterflies that I would be to you." --
"All your little animals are in one picture --?One I've had before me since a year ago to-night;?And the picture where they live will be of you, Jane Wayland, Till you find a way to kill them or to keep them out of sight." --
"Won't you ever see me as I am, John Gorham,?Leaving out the foolishness and all I never meant??Somewhere in me there's a woman, if you know the way to find her. Will you like me any better if I prove it and repent?"
"I doubt if I shall ever have the time, Jane Wayland;?And I dare say all this moonlight lying round us might as well Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns that are forgotten, As on two that have no longer much of anything to tell."
Stafford's Cabin
Once there was a cabin here, and once there was a man;?And something happened here before my memory began.?Time has made the two of them the fuel of one flame?And all we have of them is now a legend and a name.
All I have to say is what an old man said to me,?And that would seem to be as much as there will ever be.?"Fifty years ago it was we found it where it sat." --?And forty years ago it was old Archibald said that.
"An apple tree that's yet alive saw something, I suppose,?Of what it was that happened there, and what no mortal knows. Some one on the mountain heard far off a master shriek,?And then there was a light that showed the way for men to seek.
"We found it in the morning with an iron bar behind,?And there were chains around it; but no search could ever find, Either in the ashes that were left, or anywhere,?A sign to tell of who or what had been with Stafford there.
"Stafford was a likely man with ideas of his own --?Though I could never like the kind that likes to live alone; And when you met, you found his eyes were always on your shoes, As if they did the talking when he asked you for the news.
"That's all, my son. Were I to talk for half a hundred years