The Man against the Sky | Page 5

behind.
"When Reason beckons you to pause,
You laugh and say that you
know best;
But what it is you know, you keep
As dark as ingots in a
chest.
"You laugh and answer, `We are young;
O leave us now, and let us
grow.' --
Not asking how much more of this
Will Time endure or
Fate bestow.
"Because a few complacent years
Have made your peril of your pride,

Think you that you are to go on
Forever pampered and untried?
"What lost eclipse of history,
What bivouac of the marching stars,

Has given the sign for you to see
Millenniums and 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