Worn to a silvery tissue, Throws a faint glamour on the roofs, Lights tip-toe out . . . Softly as when lovers close street doors. Out of the Battery A little wind Stirs idly—as an arm Trails over a boat's side in dalliance— Rippling the smooth dead surface of the heat, Like a forlorn woman over-borne By many babies at her teats, Turns on her trampled bed to meet the day. A late snow beats FACES With cold white fists upon the tenements- Like tall old slatterns Pulling aprons about their heads. Lights slanting out of Mott Street Or dribble through bar-room slits, Conniving behind shuttered panes Is throbbing like a fistula Back of her ice-scabbed fronts. Livid faces Glimmer in furtive doorways, Or spill out of the black pockets of alleys, Making a ghastly rosary The night mumbles over And the snow with its devilish and silken whisper . Patrolling arcs Blowing shrill blasts over the Bread Line Stalk them as they pass, Silent as though accouched of the darkness, And the wind noses among them, And the Elevated slams upon the silence Like a ponderous door. Then all is still again, Save for the wind fumbling over The emptily swaying faces The wind rummaging Like an old Jew. . . But the spindle legs keep time To a limping rhythm, And the shadows twitch upon the snow As though death played With some ungainly dolls. NEW ORLEANS Do you remember Honey-melon moon Dripping thick sweet light Wind, rising in the alleys, You are full of unshaped dreams There is hope in you . . . not sweet acrid as blood in the mouth. Come into my tossing dust Scattering the peace of old deaths, Wind rising out of the alleys Carrying stuff of flame. MARIE Marie's face is a weathered sign Nickel-a-ride to the zig-zag stars, When Marie carries down the stair Your greeting takes her unaware, As a dog's unsure of its place. With that hair, of the rubbed-off gold Of a wedding-ring worn to a thread, In a halo about the head, And those luminous eyes in their rims of paint, She looks a bedizen.d saint. But when the worn moon, like a face still beautiful, Wavers above the Battery, And light comes in, mauve-gray, Squeezing through shutters of furnished rooms As a tablecloth its purple stains When a festival is ended Then Marie creeps into the house. The paint is lonesome on her cheek. That flares about its place. Arthur Davison Ficke was born at Davenport, Iowa, November 10, 1883. He received his A.B. at Harvard (1904), studied for the law and was admitted to the bar in 1908. In 1919, after two years' service in France, he gave up his law practice and devoted himself to literature exclusively. Ficke is the author of ten volumes of verse, the most representative of which are Sonnets of a Portrait Painter (1914), The Man on the Hilltop (1915) and An April Elegy (1917). In these, the author has distilled a warm spirituality, combining freshness of vision with an intensified seriousness. Having been an expert collector and student of Japanese prints, Ficke has written two books on this theme. His intellectual equipment is reinforced by a strong sense of satire. Writing under the pseudonym "Anne Knish," he was one of the co-authors (with Witter Bynner) of Spectra (1916), which, caricaturing some of the wilder outgrowths of the new poetry, was taken seriously by a majority of the critics and proved to be a brilliant hoax. Out of Silence and Other Poems (1924) is a record of the romanticist's effort to escape a world he half understands and wholly fears. The poet at least so his poems assure us—is "homesick in modernity." Even the world's beauty hurts; loveliness does not fulfill him, he is frustrated by it. Nevertheless, the foretold failure of his "secret, impossible hopes" does not prevent him from wringing an occasional if too protracted poignance from his defeat. PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN She limps with halting painful pace, Her cheeks hang gray in waxen folds |