Classic Poem

Did you hang by the neck until dead——
your mouth agape and awry, and from one side of it your blackening tongue protruding?
Did you cry out for mercy, at the last? Or worse,
did you confess to things that you did and even did not do? Or better,
did you try to lie yourself out of the affair?
Did you wriggle and squirm at the stake?
Were you put to death for thievery, or for writing poems?

Are you the wind, chilly, penetrative, sidling from behind the tree nearby,
and stealing about my thighs, like a cold but practiced hand
groping for my purse?
I believe you are the wind.
I believe, moreover,
that even the night itself is of apparitional nature——
for many a night of my own has come back on me as an apparition.

Is this the night on which you robbed the dead woman?
The aspects of the night are grizzly enough, surely:——
the wintry scuds, like glowering wraiths of rogues,
crowding together sullenly before the waning moon, and obscuring it, as if to sinister purpose;
the naked branches and twigs, many entangled, many horrent,
all rising wildly against the lowery sky,

like the unkempt hair of condemned wretches maddening in the dungeon;
the fitful snowfalls of latter evening,
stealthy of descent, and guilty of appearance when at rest
after a hurried covering up of footprints;
and looming against the snuggling white or the overhanging gray,
the blurred shapes of unlighted structures, black with unlighted midnight,
and all silent, like the deserted streets:——
all such blending together, creating an hour for robbery
of the living as well as of the dead. But look——

look yonder. Do you see that solitary light?
It shines in the house of the parish priest,
who has just received his Christmas money——
from each of a thousand parishioners a dollar.
Look. It is beginning to snow again.
In the morning there will be no footprints.

Francois, if one were surely to be put to death,
why not for thievery rather than for writing poems——
and thus get into Paradise that night?